The snow had stopped falling. Beyond them, under the steady roar of the choppers’ engines, lay the enormous folds of snow-covered Siberian cedar, larch, black spruce, and pine, broken here and there by clear, low-lying areas of oleniy mokh— “reindeer moss”—in reality flat areas of snow-covered lichens — and beyond this the five-thousand-foot barrier of the Khamar Daban Range. The effect of their sudden exit from the falling snow of the predawn light caused ambivalent feelings. For the two Cobras’ crews, clear weather meant good tank-killing conditions, but the S/D strike force and pilots aboard Stallions One and Two following the Cobras were not so joyful. The choppers might very well be like “needles in a haystack” against the vastness of the taiga, but even needles caught reflective sunlight that could be seen for miles beneath patches in the overcast but clear subarctic sky.
“Oh, isn’t this nice!” yelled out Aussie, jerking his head toward the panorama of forest and sky. “Just what the doctor ordered.” David Brentwood mustered as tough a look as he could, for even though he knew Lewis was one of the hardest men he’d ever served with, he doubted whether the newcomers aboard would be able to ignore the Australian’s inverted sense of humor. His brother and the other submariners, though David wouldn’t have had their job for the world, must, he thought, feel particularly vulnerable — quite literally fish out of water.
There was a “white out.” It was a phenomenon the pilots knew about but, contrary to widespread belief, the condition wasn’t something that occurred in a roaring blizzard. Rather, the sudden and, for those who had never experienced it, terrifying loss of perception could only be likened to that lightninglike anxiety suffered by panic attack victims. It occurred most often in clear albeit overcast conditions because of the contrast between the different whites of old and fresh snow.
The mistake of Stallion Two’s pilot was that in the moment of exhilarated relief during the exit from the falling snow to clear weather, he went off instrument flying to visual assist too quickly. In that split second he lost all depth perception, thinking he was far too high above the taiga when in fact he was far too close — only sixty feet above the blur of spear-shaped firs. His copilot realized it the moment the nose went down and pulled the stick, his feet jabbing the rudder control for uplift; but a rotor caught, and they were gone in a single somersault, rotors still spinning but upside down, cutting and slashing into the timber. The self-closing gas tank, built to absorb fifty-millimeter armor-piercing shells, imploded like a collapsed drum, spewing gas over red-hot bearings. The chopper disappeared below Cobra Two in a silent ball of saffron flame and snow, the latter rising like talc, coming down in a fine shower of rain that did nothing to extinguish the twenty-foot-high flame now licking the pines. There was a bang that everyone on the remaining Stallion and two Cobras heard.
“Holy mother of—” began Choir, but then, like the rest, he fell silent beneath the high whine of their Sea Stallion’s three General Electric turboshaft engines, its pilot instinctively going for height after the crash of the other Stallion before settling down again to the dangerous NOE flying. The submariners’ grim-lipped sonarman, Rogers, was sweating, praying again.
“Do as I tell you, damn it!” barked Cobra One’s pilot at his copilot/weapons officer. “We can’t go back. Endangers the whole mission. You know the fucking rules.”
The pilot was back on instrument flying and put on his sunglasses; not that this would be any protection against white out, but it might reduce the equally hazardous risk of ice blink, once they negotiated the passes of the range. In ice blink mirages of something twenty or more miles away across a vast sheet of ice could loom up with stunning clarity as if they were only a few hundred yards ahead.
“Relax, fellas!” It was Aussie. “Not as bad as you think. It helped us in a way.”
“What the shit d’you mean?” asked Rogers, uncharacteristic anger momentarily overcoming his air sickness and fear.
Aussie was lighting another cigarette. “Won’t be able to tell what it was — wreckage’ll look like a scrap yard. And same paint as their own, red star and all. And the guys — in Siberian uniforms.” Aussie looked at his watch. Freeman had even taken care to make sure they were of Russian make. “What are we, Davey?” Aussie asked Brentwood. “ ‘Bout a hundred miles from the lake? Twenty minutes from touchdown? Hell, it’d take ‘em fifteen minutes or so just to send out a search party — even if anyone did see the explosion. By then we’ll be down, or close enough. What we’ve gotta do now is head south for a while, out of sight of any pain-in-the-ass search party.”
“Yeah,” said one of the submariners, “but what if they’ve already spotted us? “
Aussie smiled. Choir and Davey had already seen it, Choir explaining it to the submariner. “Well, laddie, if anyone sees us, they’ll think we’re part of the rescue party. Same paint job— from any distance at all it’d be hard to tell. We’re too far inside enemy territory for them to think we might be—”
“You hope,” said the submariner.
“Ah, that’s not all,” said Aussie confidently. “You see, mate, when we start up those noisy Arrows anyone within cooee distance’ll think it’s one of their damned snowmobiles joining the search for the downed chopper.”
David Brentwood clicked on his throat mike. “Captain?”
“Go ahead.”
“This is Captain Brentwood. Suggest we divert south for a while — avoid any search party coming out of Port Baikal.”
“No problem.”
It took two minutes for the Stallion pilot to signal the two Cobras — intercraft radio silence being strictly enforced and requiring either hand or “craft maneuver” signalling before the three remaining choppers swung south on the last leg through or, if necessary, up over the six-thousand-foot Khamar Daban range before they could take a fix on Tankhoy, twenty-seven miles across the ice from Port Baikal.
Fifteen miles from where the Stallion had gone down, an argument was building between the ten members of a SPETS squad standing by a Hind helo.
“Idite za nimi”—”l say follow them in,” said the SPETS leader, referring to the three dots they could see heading for the Khamar Daban Range.
“Zachem?”— “Why?” asked the serzhant. “They’re probably ours. Big one’s probably a Hind, like ours. Other two are probably Havocs.”
“Hinds, Havocs!” shouted the SPETS leader.”You can’t tell from here even with binoculars. They were more than a mile off.”
“Whatever you say, Comrade,” replied the sergeant. “But I say we’re wasting time. Let’s go on to Ulan-Ude. Our orders are to relieve one of the sections at the head of the Thirty-first’s spearhead.”
“There are already two thousand of us at the Thirty-first’s spearhead,” said the leader.”I say let’s follow those three choppers.”
“Make up your mind, comrades,” advised the Hind captain assigned to transport the ten SPETS. “Personally I think we should go on to Ulan-Ude, as the sergeant says. We’re getting low on gas anyway.”
“Did you see them?” snapped the SPETS leader, a big man, well over six feet and broad but not an ounce of flab on him.
“No,” admitted the Hind pilot.
“You?” the leader asked the gunner.
“Too far off, sir,” said the gunner, and, quickly trying for compromise, added, “Why don’t we call Irkutsk, leave it up to them?”
The nine other SPETS waited for their captain to bawl out the air force pilot for forgetting they were on strict SPETS operational procedure — no radio contact allowed in the event it might be picked up by distant American AWACs. Tightening the sling of his AK-74, the SPETS leader then lifted his right fist, waving it in a circular motion. The Hind coughed, sputtered, and snow swirled about the SPETS as they clambered aboard. The Hind’s nose gunner, immediately in front of and beneath the pilot, was cursing, strapping himself in behind the twin 12.7-millimeter machine guns in his armor-plated cubbyhole. He had a girl, a Buryat, waiting for him in Ulan-Ude.
“Polnym khodom!”—”Dash speed!” ordered the SPETS captain. This should take it to 180 miles per hour — but a few miles would be lost because of the extra weight of the ten SPETS and the helo’s four “Swatter” antitank missiles.
The pilot went visual as he could not put on his radar; otherwise he would run the risk of setting off every AA gun and missile battery that was strung along Baikal’s lakeshore, camouflaged in the forests.
He barely managed to get a fix on the three distant helos; they looked like dots of pepper against the white pallet of the western sky. He was watching the gas needle — soon they’d have to be refueled, the nearest POL depot at Port Baikal. Damn the SPETS — they should have gone on to Ulan-Ude. He banked the gunship in the direction of the dots, doubting he’d catch them unless they suddenly jinxed due west and he could take the hypotenuse vector between them. If it was a Hind and two Havocs on patrol out of Port Baikal or Irkutsk further west, it would make him and the SPETS look real idioty. Well, it was the SPETS leader’s decision, not his. The pilot swung the Hind’s gun-sprouting nose up, climbing, going for “high ground” from which he could see better across the taiga. Even so, he lost sight of them for a moment, the three dots heading into one of the passes through the mountain range toward the frozen inland Sea of Baikal.
By now the lead Cobra was looking for muskeg, hoping for an open patch in the forest, no more than a mile or two from the shore, using Tankhoy as a general heading but keeping well away from any sign of habitation. It was the copilot who spotted a promising site, and within seconds the Cobra began a “sway,” signalling the Super Stallion and the other Cobra that he’d found a landing. The air was so clear now he could see a thin wisp of smoke from what had to be Port Baikal across the lake, the smoke rising to the right of creamy white cliffs of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s spur line from Kultuk at the southern end of the lake to Port Baikal. He told his copilot he didn’t know which was best for the commandos: clear weather, which would make it much easier and therefore quicker for them to reach their target, or snowy conditions, which, while slowing them down, would have provided them with more cover.
“They got clear weather, man,” said the copilot/weapons officer. “You can see for miles. They ain’t got no choice.”
“True.”
The Snowcat “Arrow,” technical designation UH-19P, was based on another American air-cushion vehicle speed record-holder, the UH-15. Like the UH-15 hovercraft, the Snowcat was triangular or, as seen from above, arrowhead-shaped, a mid-placed cockpit seating three, the military version placing the driver slightly higher and behind the other two.
Nineteen feet long and seven and a half feet wide, the triangular Snowcat, with an eight-inch clearance, was powered by an 1100cc Toyota car engine, its speed the same as the old record-setting UH-15: eighty miles per hour over water, ninety miles per hour over ice or snow, with a maximum gradient tolerance of thirty to forty degrees, depending on the condition of snow or ice pack. Its payload was a thousand pounds, which could easily handle three commandos and their equipment. In the lead Arrow this included a heavy, swivel-mounted, forty-millimeter M-19 machine gun in front of the cockpit as well as the gun’s box-contained belt feed ammunition — the gun’s forty-inch barrel having a theoretical 180-degree traverse. In practice, as Aussie had discovered on a dry-run assembly, the safest maximum arc of fire was 90 degrees, consisting of a 45-degree swing left or right. The noise that bothered him was, ironically, not the main thrust engine but the air cushion’s lift system, powered by an 1800-horsepower, 1600cc Briggs and Stratton vertical-shaft lawnmower engine, which drove an axial fan, the latter’s six-foot-diameter blade mounted at the back, or widest part of the arrowhead.
Delivery of the three-man crafts, ordered much earlier in the campaign by Freeman, had been delayed not because of any mechanical malfunction but because of the general’s insistence that the usual black skirting for the air cushion be painted white. The delay in delivery meant that the eight “designated drivers,” as David Brentwood had called them, had had only an hour or so to practice the previous evening. Now, with one Stallion, gone, he had only four drivers. But the controls were simple, even if Aussie complained of their “bloody Sunday” lawnmower noise and the rough ride, which frankly had surprised all of them except Robert Brentwood who, as part of his naval training in combined ops amphibious training, was already familiar with the gut-shuddering motion of ACVs, in particular the monstrous, barge-sized marine hovercrafts.
As the four craft from the remaining Stallion slid effortlessly down the rollers of the Stallion’s ramp door, guided by the six-man S/D and four-man sub crew team, the crews of the three choppers, zipping up their thick thermal jackets, were already busy spreading out the camouflage nets over the lone Stallion and two Cobras.
“Did you know the men on the Stallion well?” Robert Brentwood asked his younger brother, in an effort to share his loss of the four submariners.
“No.” It was said almost rudely, but David, as commander of the land part of the mission, was too preoccupied with its details for any sentiment to intrude. Besides, there was a nagging, albeit childish, determination on his part not to show any weakness to his older brother. As if reading his mind, Robert immediately deferred to his younger brother’s authority on the timing of the mission now that there had been the complication of the Havoc attack. “Wait till nightfall? “
“No,” answered David, adjusting his ammo pouch pack. “We go now.”
“You worried about that Havoc?”
“Yes. Maybe they’ll send out a search party. Better we push off soon as the birds are covered.”
Aussie looked around at the mention of “birds,” obviously thinking of making a crack, but he didn’t. There was too much to do helping Choir who, with David and Aussie, would man the lead Arrow; the sub crew of four and the other three Delta men would spread out in the other three Arrows. Some weapons, including a Stinger, a LAW antitank tube, and Aussie’s long sniper rifle, had to be strapped to the fuselage before they left. Choir was checking the front of the Arrow, making sure the protective plastic barrel cap was tight enough to withstand the rapid vibration of the air cushion.
Robert Brentwood called the other three submariners over. He would be driving one of the Arrows, Rogers another. “Remember, we’ll go in single file — S/D One leading, S/D Two covering our rear. Literally.” A couple of men smiled.”They’re the ones with experience in this kind of operation. Rogers—”
“Sir?”
“You’ll be right behind their lead Arrow. I’ll be behind you. Remember, single line formation for as long as we can — hopefully the whole way. But if anything goes wrong and we’re fired on from the flanks, then we move to abreast position.”
“Whose breast?” interjected Aussie nearby. The submariners ignored him. Robert reassured them. “Your part’ll start on the sub.” They all knew he meant if they reached Port Baikal and could take a GST without being killed first. But Brentwood knew it wasn’t time to kindle the doubt in everyone’s mind.
“What are they going to do after?” asked Rogers. He meant what would happen to the S/D team.
“They’ll come back to the choppers, wait till darkness or a snowstorm, whichever comes first, and take off with the Cobras and the Stallion. Look, don’t worry. Once we get a sub we’ll be the safest of all.” Only Rogers understood immediately, the point being that, once they were below, the sub would be the same as any other of the three or four GSTs they figured were operating in the lake.
“It’ll be a lookalike masked ball,” Robert Brentwood joked. “All look the same; nobody’ll be able to see us anyway. All done by sound, remember, fellas.”
“Quiet!” It was Aussie Lewis, and through the ear-ringing silence of the forest they could hear the distant chopping sound of helicopters. “Sure as hell’s not ours,” pronounced one of the Cobra pilots.
“Get those Arrows out of the open!” ordered Aussie.
With everyone but Aussie Lewis lending a hand, the four Arrows were pushed back up the rollers into the Stallion beneath the camouflage net.
Aussie broke off into the cover of the forest, whipping off the canvas cover from the Haskins rifle, and, without flipping open the bipod, rested the ice-cold, twenty-three-pound weapon against a fir, turning the scope’s “bullet” impact screw. Withdrawing the bolt — this being necessary before loading each 1.5-ounce bullet, whose combination incendiary/HE/high temperature, super-hardened penetrator head was capable of smashing through a plane engine or passing through an APC — he waited. Either way, Lewis figured if the Siberians spotted something and hovered over them even for a second, he’d cost them a pilot, gunner, or the “whole mother,” as the three Delta men called an enemy chopper. The noise was louder now; the rotor slap, while not overhead, was coming much closer. He glimpsed Rogers, the submariner, only about ten feet from him, under one of the Cobra’s nets, eyes closed. Another prayer. Aussie preferred to trust in his Kevlar bullet-proof vest. He saw movement — Choir Williams kneeling beneath the camouflage net of the Stallion, ready with his squad automatic weapon, and Salvini, one of the Delta men, his M-60 resting on his knee, right hand on the grip.
In Port Baikal, the overtime midnight-to-eight shift over, Nefski’s subaltern came home to his small, drab apartment block, one of the largest buildings in the town. Taking off his greatcoat, he kissed his wife, her Buryat face lined with the travail of being a garrison wife. He told her that she looked tired.
“Kak vsegda”—”Like always,” she replied, surprised by the kiss.
Hanging up his coat in their apartment’s tiny hallway, he glanced at the laundry bag that hung from the knob on their bedroom door and announced generously that he’d take it down the hallway to the communal laundry for her.
“I’ll do it,” she said. She always had.
“Rest,” he said.
“Rest?” She hadn’t heard him tell her to rest in twenty-two years. Not even when their second child, now a KGB border guard like his father, had been born did he tell her to rest. Whenever he was off guard duty she was expected to be his servant — the only thing he’d do would be to take his boots off, then it was “You have the samovar going?” And always, like this evening, it was going. Except tonight there was no question about the samovar — His Royal Highness had become Comrade Highness. Peeling one of the onions she’d had in the line of glass jars she kept in the window to catch what winter sun she could, Tanya’s eyes began to water and, taking the kitchen rag from its rack by the old age-veined porcelain sink, she wiped her eyes. Seeing the rag was ready for washing, she took it out into the hallway. “Ivan!” she called. The moment he looked back at her from the front door, he was a picture of guilt, a thief running away with the laundry bag. Another peculiar thing — he’d changed into his best weekend trousers.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
“Nothing. Can’t a man offer to help his wife now and then?” he shot back defensively. “All the time we hear about Siberian women complaining they are slaves, you never get help. Well? I’m giving you help, woman.”
“In your Sunday clothes?”
“Ah! I spilled coffee on them,” he said, meaning his uniform.
It was a dim, sickly, thirty-watt bulb in the hallway, but even so she could see he was blushing. Immediately she suspected another woman and grabbed the bag from him.
“Ah—” he uttered disgustedly, snatching his greatcoat from the hallway and jerking open the door.
“Where are you going? Ivan, where—”
“Out!” It meant he was going to the Port Baikal Hotel to get blind drunk.
Tanya was convinced it was another woman now. And when, her heart beating in panic, she inspected the trousers, she found the evidence. He’d tried to sponge it off, but the edge of the stain was stiff, as if it had been starched. She sat in the hallway for half an hour without moving, but all that time a volcanic rage was welling within. Finally she made her way to the kitchen, the soup nearly burnt dry, where she took one of the onions from the jars, laid it on the countertop, and sat waiting for him.
The moment he came in she screamed and threw the jar, aiming for his head. He recoiled, getting an arm up in time, the jar hitting him below the left eye. Closing, raining blows against him, she told him she’d never let him touch her again, shouting that he was to get out and never come back. She didn’t care if he died in the snow.
“Touch you!” he shouted back drunkenly. “Who’d want to touch you, you fat slob?” She threw another onion bottle at him, the onion’s long shoot trailing like a taper, but all her strength had gone in her rage, and the jar missed, hitting her anorak instead, falling harmlessly to the floor, rolling along the worn linoleum. He stuck his head back inside to say that it was his apartment, too. She tried to throw the laundry bag at him but fell.
The KGB duty officer told him there was no way he could come in on his shift tomorrow afternoon looking like that. He could lie and tell Nefski he’d fallen or something, but Nefski would never believe such a story and suspect he’d been drunk and fighting again, for which Nefski would give him a punishment.
“You’d better stay here,” the duty officer told him. “Take guard duty at the dock. Easy work, but don’t go taking a snooze.”
Ivan didn’t like the idea of guard duty at thirty below, in Port Baikal or anywhere else, but in truth he rather relished having told his comrades just what had happened. A man whose wife suspected him of seeing another woman — well, his reputation rose among the boys.
“Colonel Nefski’s back on duty later today,” warned the duty officer. “In case he visits the dock you’d better have a good explanation ready. Tell him you were hit by an icicle or something.” It was a good story, Ivan having seen a number of soldiers who had been injured, some of them seriously, when a huge icicle, having built up after successive snowstorms, thawed a little and fell from a roof’s eave like a club.
The pilot of the SPETS chopper that had been following the three fly-size specks had now lost sight of his quarry. They had disappeared somewhere in the taiga, but the taiga was a sea of snow-covered forest, clearings like those he’d already flown over as numerous as troughs in a sea, and all looking more or less the same. He could spend weeks in a futile search. “Turnback?” he asked the SPETS captain.
“No, go around to the end of the lake. See if they came down there. Maintain radio silence in case they are enemy choppers.”
“Tak tochno”—”Yes, sir,” answered the pilot, taking the Hind out over the edge of the forest. The Hind was now above the southern end of the mirror-finish expanse of ice that was twenty-five miles wide and almost four hundred miles long.
David Brentwood saw the blob of the SPETS chopper looking for them, passing within a quarter mile, and glanced at his watch. The Stallion pilot told him the Hind would probably be doing around 150 knots.
“So,” estimated David, “they should be across the lake in fifteen to twenty minutes.”
“Yeah.”
“Do we still go across in daylight?” asked Robert Brentwood.
“Affirmative,” said David. “If they do report any possible enemy activity to Irkutsk or Port Baikal, men we might as well hit ‘em sooner rather than later. Give them less time to prepare.”
“There’s another consideration,” put in Robert. “You don’t load on your torpedoes and missiles at night if you can help it.”
“Good thinking, Bob!” said Aussie approvingly, Robert Brentwood more surprised than offended by the Australian’s easy familiarity with rank.
“Okay,” said David, “then we go now. Synchronize oh eight one zero hours… now! We leave at eight-thirty.” He glanced across at Aussie. “Hope you and Choir made sure that these jobs—” He indicated the four Arrows, “—are properly winterized?”
“Yes, sir,” said Aussie with exaggerated bonhomie. “Oil in those suckers’d lubricate a desert whore.”
One of the submariners asked Aussie, “You ever think of anything but sex?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“Beer! Lordy, what I’d give for a schooner of Foster’s right now.”
“Freeze your guts out,” said Choir.”I can’t feel my toes.”
“Then wriggle them, sweetheart,” said one of the Delta men. “You never have winter training?”
“What for?” asked Aussie facetiously, despite the fact that the SAS winter training had been a top priority. “That’s only for ski bums.”
“Keep quiet!” said David.
From then on all they could hear was the soft moaning of the taiga, as lonely a sound as any of them had ever heard. For the next twenty minutes it was time for every soldier in the ten-man team and the Stallion’s and Cobras’ crews, who would stay behind, to be with himself, to go over what he had to do — to meditate upon the need for speed and surprise. David smelled the clean fragrance of winter pine that not even deep snow could suffocate, and momentarily he thought of Georgina, of what she was doing at this very moment. In England it would be 11:15 in the evening. A clump of snow fell from a branch, jolting him back to the taiga. He went over the satellite pics again, noting that what looked like it could be a slipway was left of the town near one of the railway tunnels they’d had to build on the cliffs coming around the lake’s southwestern end.
At 8:30 they started the four Arrows, the rattling roar of the engines alarming.
“Christ!” said Choir, usually the quietest of the three SAS men. “They’ll hear us clear to the Pole.”
“Ah, rats,” said Aussie, climbing into the front seat, strapping himself in next to Choir.”Don’t sweat it, mate.” He patted the SPETS shoulder patch on the otherwise all-white winter garb. “They’ll just think it’s a few comrades coming across.”
Choir said something about Aussie being the one who’d been going on so much about the noise, but it was lost to the roar of the four engines. Aussie and Choir found it a squeeze. Although normally there was plenty of room for two, they were both in bulky winter uniforms. And while the case containing Aussie’s sniper rifle was lashed to the fuselage, Aussie, on David Brentwood’s order, had to hold the Stinger’s AA tube like a cylindrical map case between his legs, eliciting an obscene comment from the Delta man with the M-60 light machine gun in the fourth and last Arrow. Choir checked the first few exposed rounds of the forty-millimeter box/belt ammo feed for the M-19 heavy machine gun mounted on the front of the lead Arrow. Each six-ounce round, both ends looking like round lollipops, was in effect a six-ounce grenade, capable of piercing sixty millimeters of armor plate at three miles, the rate of fire in “cooler barrel” Arctic conditions being 350 rather than 320 rounds a minute. Though it could be either electrically or mechanically operated, Choir didn’t like the “beast”; the M-19, for all its firepower, had a bad habit of jamming every twenty-nine hundred rounds or so.
“Not to worry, sport!” yelled Aussie. “If you can’t kill what you gotta kill in nine minutes, Choir, you ain’t never gonna do it.”
As they moved off, throttles closed down to just above stall, the heavy snow and trees absorbing the noise much more than they had anticipated, they made their way cautiously through the trees and light underbrush to the lake’s edge. Choir was still tugging the forty-millimeter belt worriedly. “Don’t worry, mate,” Aussie told him. “Hopefully you won’t have to use it.”
“Right.”
“You mean ‘bullshit’!” laughed Aussie.
“Right.”
The lake hurt their eyes. Though overcast the glare was intense, and within seconds every one of the ten men in the S/D/ sub team had pulled down his sunglasses which, again on Freeman’s insistence, were all Soviet issue, captured on the way to Khabarovsk.
The SPETS chopper saw them.
Following David Brentwood’s lead in the first Arrow, the drivers in the other three Arrows behind opened up the throttles so wide their wrists ached, the midpoint between the railway tunnel up left a hundred yards or so above the lakeshore and the town’s small library and hotel a few hundred yards to the right.
Sonarman Rogers, driving the second Arrow with Delta trooper O’Reilly, swung left to avoid the exhaust from the first vehicle, his Arrow shuddering over small, swollen ice ridges on the otherwise mirror-glass-smooth lake. Rogers glanced ahead for a second to get a quick bearing on the terrain. Someone yelled, then someone else, but it was too late. They hit a ridge-only a foot high. The Arrow upended, skittering across the ice, leaving at first a thin but then ever-widening wake of frothing arterial blood.
In the third Arrow, the Delta driver, Lou Salvini, caught a glance, but despite what he saw he didn’t hesitate and closed the gap, the three of them now heading straight for Port Baikal.
The submariner in Robert Brentwood’s Arrow, the man who would have to take over Rogers’s sonar job if they made it, did all he could not to throw up when he spotted what looked like a sodden black-red mop: Rogers’s head, rolling obscenely across the ice, a gray spaghettilike substance trailing it. O’Reilly was still, his neck broken.
David was waving to the Hind coming to investigate, its bug eyes growing by the second. They were all waving. The Hind made a low pass and went into a left turn for another look-see.
“Smile, you Welsh bastard!” Aussie yelled at Choir above the roar of the Arrow. “Smile at the fucking comrades.” Choir waved, forcing a dour Welsh grin into something more gregarious looking while flipping the safety off the M-19 that he didn’t like. “What’s the bloody vertical on this?” he shouted at Aussie, his smile widening.
“ ‘Bout thirty degrees,” said David.
“That’s a lot of—” He waved at the comrades again as the chopper passed overhead. Port Baikal, now six miles away, was clearly visible, a mirage of it looming out on the ice far to their right. They were bucking a head wind now, flowing southward in advance of the forecasted blizzard over four hundred miles due north. David Brentwood glanced at his watch, the speedometer needle quivering between fifty-five and sixty. The Port Baikal old dock was clearly visible, but they wouldn’t reach it for another seven to ten minutes. The most important thing was to go straight to the railway tunnel that was two hundred yards to the left of the hotel and library.
Aussie tried to get a bead on the tunnel and dock, but the vibration against the Stinger tube was giving him a headache. He passed it to Choir who had spotted the slipway — a concave, smooth but definitely gutterlike depression, about ten to fifteen feet wide, that led, like a gradual slide from the mouth of the tunnel to the spread of ice-free water by the dock where the Angara River began its exit from the lake.
Nefski’s subordinate wasn’t the first to see the approaching snow vehicles, which he thought were some kind of snegovoy traktor— “snowmobile”—but rather he was the one the guard called over, wondering what they were. Ivan went to the big stand holding Schneider 11 x 80 power binoculars by the tunnel’s entrance, morosely pulled the canvas cover up, and bent forward to adjust the focus. A blur of dots snapped into sharp relief against the ice.
“Ours, I guess,” he said disinterestedly, without taking a second look, still nursing the bitter fight he’d had with his wife and generally feeling pretty sorry for himself. “Haven’t seen snowmobiles like that before, though.” Then again, he told the other guard, they certainly made as much racket. It wasn’t until another three minutes had passed that, his mind off his wife for a moment, he told his comrade grumpily, “Better tell the duty officer. Who’s on?”
“Nefski.”
“Shit! You tell ‘im. I don’t want him to see this.” He pointed to his black eye. “Bastard’ll put the on punishment.”
The other man slung his rifle and walked over the hard-crusted snow, his breath going before him like steam as he made his way toward Nefski’s office in the old library.
“Colonel, sir. There looks like a patrol coming in.”
Nefski was alarmed. Despite the fact that they were hundreds of miles from the most forward troops of the U.S. Second Army, he was immediately suspicious. He didn’t know of any patrols supposed to be coming in. “Call out the squad!”
“Yes, sir,” said the guard, walking outside to start the siren. Begi!”— “Run!” ordered Nefski. “There are two subs in, you idiot!” Before the Klaxon began its long wail, Nefski had grabbed the phone from its cradle and was pushing the red button for the dock. “How long till you leave?”
‘We’re almost ready now, Colonel. Be about another—”
“Get them into the water — now! Move!” shouted Nefski.
“But, sir, some of the men are over in the hotel…”
“I don’t care. We don’t have the time. Get the winches moving. I’ll call the ho—” The library wall was disappearing in front of his eyes, forty-millimeter grenades ripping, tearing it open like a pull-tab on a beer carton, debris flying everywhere.
“Bogomater!”— “Mother of God!” He fell to the floor, the phone banging beside him, its Bakelite cracked beyond repair, his nose bleeding. Luckily through the dangling earpiece he could hear the phone in the hotel ringing three times.
“Hotel-”
“Colonel Nefski. Tell all the submariners to get back to the tunnel immediately. You understand?”
“What’s going on?”
“Tell them!” he screamed. The next moment the line was hissing like a samovar.
In the tunnel a skeleton crew of four men worked like navvies at the winches that would let down one of the fifty-foot-long by fifteen-foot-wide toroidal subs, its eight “anti-lake-access” torpedoes looking for all the world like stovepipes attached to its superstructure, the bulges of the four cruise missiles wider but shorter on the outer casing.
The first sub was a quarter of the way down the hundred-yard ice slipway; retractable wing vanes extended from either side of the black, egg-shaped sub like the outriggers of a canoe to stop the midget from rolling before it reached the water. The four Siberians working the winch, not realizing that it wasn’t the sub that was under fire but rather the library and hotel, frantically redoubled their efforts — a line of twenty to thirty KGB border guards racing toward the slipway. Behind them came the squeak of a tank heading down from its defilade position on the steep forested slope along the narrow road leading westward from the town.
There were screams of men hit, one flung backward like a rag doll under the impact of the forty-millimeter, while at the far end of the tunnel, the two-man Goryonov 7.62-millimeter machine-gun crew were dead, one slumped over the gun, the other, his face missing, flung back over the sandbags by the rail tracks that had carried the midget submarines the last few miles to the slipway. There was more screaming now, mixed with a sound like wasps swarming as the three Arrows surged up the incline from the lake, stopping about twenty yards abreast, close to a heavy ice bank that formed the eastern wall of the slipway. The line of border guards fifty yards ahead across the slipway and now slightly above them poured fire in their general direction. David Brentwood, hard up against the ice wall, smacked Choir’s shoulder hard so that he’d feel it through the Kevlar vest. “Get the M-19 off the Arrow and on its bipod. Aussie, three o’clock high!”
Aussie Lewis looked up, squinting despite the shades, and saw the twin bubble nose of the Hind rising from behind the hotel into the sun, its pilot now realizing it had been an enemy force they’d seen on the lake.
The chopper, relying on the glare to blind its opponents, was in Aussie’s line of sight for only three seconds — the time it took him to fire the Stinger from two hundred yards, which was virtually point-blank range. The explosion was crimson, spilling fiery fuel down around the hotel, some of the gasoline sweeping across four or five of its defenders, sending them screaming, rolling into the trench behind the border guards’ ice wall, distracting their comrades and kicking up so much ice and snow in their efforts to douse themselves that two of the three Delta men had no difficulty lobbing six grenades in as many seconds, the grenades’ flashes lost in the sunlight but going off deep in the trench, killing at least another three defenders.
The sub, passing down the slipway between them and the defenders, was nearing the water.
“Stop those bastards!” yelled Aussie, swinging the Stinger to his left at the men working the winch and executing his own command before any of the other S/D men needed to. Two of the winchmen simply disappeared under the rocket’s impact; what was left of them splattered over the remaining submarine. Aussie reloaded, got a bead on the second sub in the tunnel, and heard Robert Brentwood shouting, “No! Let’s be sure of the first one before we—”
“Roger!” said Aussie and, turning right, fired the Stinger round into the hotel, a hundred yards front right, just to keep things moving. The next instant he heard a “thwack!” and one of the Delta men, a moment before spread-eagled atop the ice wall for a better shot, was tumbling backward, grabbing at his throat, but there was no hope. The jugular severed, he was spurting blood in jets, tumbling into the slipway, sliding all the way down, smashing into the midget sub’s keel. But by now the defenders, thoroughly demoralized, were retreating to the library as David Brentwood, attaching three “bread rolls”—balls of plastique — on the cable leading from the winch to the sub, pushed in a pencil-size detonator and flicked the fuse selector to “three minutes.”
“Off you go!” he told Robert and, without a look backward, Robert Brentwood and the two remaining submariners slithered down the gutter-shaped slipway, using their boots to brake themselves against the keel, one of them already with a hand on the right side vane to haul himself up to the six-foot, oil-drum-shaped conning tower.
“Not yet!” Robert Brentwood ordered the seaman. “Not till the charge goes. Get forward of midships. Otherwise when that cable blows it’ll—” It blew, the sudden release of tension recoiling one half of the wire back to the winch, making a high, singing noise, the other half whipping toward the sub but catching Lawson, one of the Delta men, and almost severing his right foot. For a second or so he felt absolutely no pain, only astonishment, realizing that in breaking the impact of the wire, he’d saved the life of one of the two submariners with Robert Brentwood. The cable smacked the keel, flopping to the icy slipway and finally lying still, like a dead snake.
The sub was now afloat with Robert Brentwood and the two submariners already down the conning tower. The powerful whiff of sweat assaulted Brentwood’s nose, and for a split second he thought one of the winchmen was hiding in the sub; but there was no one, the sub simply not having had enough time to be aerated by the cold pine smell of the taiga.
By now Choir and the remaining Delta man, Salvini, had the M-19 on its stand and were pouring a terrible fire into the library and hotel. Aussie rested the Stinger tube across the Arrow’s cockpit for a good shot at the second sub. There was a “swoosh” of back blast from the Stinger, a crimson explosion in the tunnel, and a ringing of scrap metal. That GST was gone.
Once inside the midget submarine it was easier than Robert Brentwood and his two crewmen thought it would be. They didn’t need to know anything about the Cyrillic alphabet, the dials self-explanatory to any submariner. The three men moved automatically to the stations they’d have to operate as a skeleton crew. For them, the sensation was very much like moving from a fully automatic automobile to a VW Beetle with standard shift. It was all more or less clear at a glance, the only real difference being the pipes that went round and round the toroidal hull, which allowed for the storage of recycled gaseous oxygen for them to breathe; it also ran the GST’s closed-circuit diesel engine.
The immediate concern was to submerge as quickly as possible. “Hatch closed!” said Johnson, one of the two remaining submariners. The other man, Lopez, stood by the diesel motor control and steerage levers that would allow him to work the relatively primitive yet effective horizontal hydroplanes that would govern their “up” and “down” angles, and the vertical rudder, half above, half below the horizontal plane, to control the yaw, or left-right movement.
“Very well,” Brentwood responded to Johnson. Turning to Lopez, he ordered, “Stand by to discharge.”
“Stand by to discharge, sir.”
Brentwood switched on the small sonar screen by the narrow twin day and nighttime periscopes column, no bigger than six inches in diameter, and checked there was no obstruction ahead or below registered by the “passive” radar sensors that were built into the GST’s hull.
“Dive! Dive! Dive! Open all vents!” he commanded.
“Opening all vents, aye, sir!” responded Johnson, and they could hear the water rushing and gurgling in, its noise transmitted through the pressure hull. Lopez immediately put her nose into a sharp dive, Brentwood wrapping an arm around the scope column as the GST went down on a twenty-degree incline.
“Twenty feet… thirty feet… forty feet…” announced Johnson unhurriedly, rhythmically, multiplying the readout in meters by three, already getting the feel of her.
“Level at one hundred,” ordered Brentwood.
“Level at one hundred, aye, sir… Forty feet… forty-five…” They could hear the icy growl above them as huge plates shifted. The slight movement was unnoticeable to the naked eye, but it was in part a response to the enormous struggle, the pulling apart of tectonic plates far below the five-thousand-foot lake which caused fissures that accounted for the temperature inversions throughout the lake and gave rise often to the fast, warm, upstreaming currents that created thin ice here and there.
“Seventy feet… eighty feet…”
“Stand by to declutch.”
“Stand by to—” began Lopez.
“Declutch!” ordered Brentwood, and within three seconds Lopez had levelled the tiny sub, though it was rocking slightly, and disengaged the generating power from the diesel that had been charging up the batteries, shifting the power to propulsion charge. All three of them were surprised by the lack of any forward sensation other than levelling out. It was an extraordinarily quiet vessel.
“Steer one one two,” ordered Brentwood.
“One one two, sir.”
“Half ahead,” ordered Brentwood.
“Half ahead, sir.” Within five seconds they were running at eight knots. Brentwood, for the first time in the mission, relaxed slightly, nodding his head in admiration at the other two, his mood taken up by Johnson, who, watching the pressure gauges, announced, “That old Italian, Santi, designed it good, eh, Captain?”
“The Siberians built it,” said Brentwood, “but you’re right. We have us a good craft, gentlemen. Even so, ‘fraid it’s going to be hard going with only three of us. At the most only one of us can catch a nap now and then.”
“No sweat, sir,” answered Johnson. Lopez gave a diplomatic smile.
“How deep’s this lake again, sir?” asked Johnson.
“Goes to six thousand,” answered Brentwood. “Eight thousand square miles of ice above us, gentlemen — eight thousand square miles of mud — accumulated silt — beneath us.” They could hear a popping and then a crackling sound — the battle, not abating, still going on at dockside. The noises of the odd grenade or round striking the ice-free entrance — the outflow of the Angara River — sped through the frigid water at over four times the speed they would in the air.
“Sir?” It was Johnson up forward.
“What is it?”
“I’ve just noticed there’s a second hatch here. We were in such a hurry getting down I just automatically—”
“That’s all right,” said Brentwood, but he was puzzled, even as he told Johnson to secure the second hatch. Before it closed, however, he spied a small pressure gauge, the size of an alarm clock, on the side of the five-foot-wide, six-foot-high conning tower and realized it was an airlock that could be flooded and pumped out, if need be.
“Well, good old Santi!” said Johnson. “Escape hatch and all, eh, Skipper?”
“Yes,” said Brentwood, about to bring up the painfully obvious fact that — in his opinion at least — building an escape hatch, taking up extra space in the already-crowded midget, had been a waste of good material. If a torpedo hit the midget submarine anywhere, he doubted there’d be enough time for anyone to make the airlock. Besides which it would take awhile, once the bottom hatch was secured, to bleed in water through the top hatch, allowing the escaping submariner to pop out and close the hatch so that it could then be pumped empty for the next man — providing you had at least one of the three pumps working after a torpedo attack. By that time the sub would be below its crush depth of around two thousand feet. The slightest hairline fracture then would create an aerosol inside the sub coming in at over a thousand pounds per square inch, such a force imploding the sub flatter than a sumo wrestler sitting on a paper cup.
The passive sonar sensors were operating at full strength, their nine green lights on without a flicker. It was the first moment of silence that they’d had in the mission; Johnson only now had time to look around for the toilet. After the sheer fright of the firelight on the shore, he felt like his bladder was going to burst. “Where’s the head?”
“Right under me,” said Lopez, pointing to the waste chamber. “They thought of everything, Captain. Guy on steerage doesn’t have to go far to take a leak.”
“No one has far to go in here,” said Johnson, looking about the instrument-cluttered sub, so jam-packed with equipment that it was virtually impossible for two men to pass at once. There were only two six-foot-long, two-foot-wide, fold-down plank bunks, whose mattresses were made up of two spread-out SCUBA “Arctic escape” diving suits, the two SCUBA helmets and relatively small, champagne-bottle-size oxygen tanks fixed to the bulkhead only four inches from the nose of whoever used the top bunk for a nap. “Everything in this damn thing’s so small,” complained Johnson, looking at the small 02 tanks.
“Well, don’t worry,” said Brentwood. “Hopefully we won’t have to use them.”
The temperature in the sub was sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but with each man wearing four layers of winter-battle uniform, it felt like a sauna bath. Brentwood set the lead by stripping down to his long Johns; the problem was where to stow even the tightly rolled, sleeping-bag-size bundles of uniform. Lopez sat on one, and they jury-rigged the other two forward and aft of the scope column, Brentwood inspecting the lashings to make sure there was no possibility that the six-inch-diameter day scope, or smaller three-inch night scope, would have any chance of being snagged. The first thing they found out was that while the heat exchange and scrubbing system above the GST took good care of the oxygen, it did what Johnson called “sweet FA” for human sweat. He only hoped it would deal better with the human waste tank under Lopez. They couldn’t risk venting it for fear the sound might give their position away as they began their search for the three other submarines, whose four cruise missile salvos had brought Freeman’s Second Army to a standstill.
One of the nine thimble-size sonar sensor lights was blinking amber, and on the screen they could see “a little dancing,” as Rogers would have called it. Johnson turned up the magnification, giving Brentwood the scale. But even on maximum enlarge, the “dancing” was too small to signify any threat, and Brentwood guessed they were getting tiny “flits” of sound from the gobmianka— “fish”—that were indigenous to the lake and whose eyes, taking up a third of their nine-inch body, could give off a signal. Each female gave birth to around seventeen hundred small ones each fall, and their schools were capable of giving off a boat-size “echo.” The “dancing” had disappeared.
“Wonder how the boys are doin’ up there?” asked Johnson.
“Hope they’re out by now,” said Lopez. “I sure as hell wouldn’t—” He stopped, in deference to Robert Brentwood. Brentwood looked at his watch. “If they can get back in the taiga around there, around Port Baikal, and wait it out till dark, which should be around three p.m. at this latitude, they’ll have a good chance, I think.”
“Yeah,” said Lopez, nodding in agreement, but it was more wishful thinking than conviction.
“They’ll be fine,” said Johnson.
“Yeah.” It was a small thing, Robert Brentwood hardly ever saying “yeah,” but in the close confines of the midget submarine such informality came much more naturally, and was almost necessary, in his view, if they were to work well as a team.
“One of us should take an hour’s nap at a time,” he told Johnson and Lopez, “so that—”
On the sonar screen there was a large blip that had appeared very suddenly, the magnification showing that it was moving at over thirty knots. It was heading straight for the GST.
“Bearing?” asked Brentwood.
“Zero three three, sir,” answered Johnson.
It was on their left quarter.
“Range,” added Johnson, “three thousand yards and closing.”
Lopez was tense at the steerage position, keeping an eye on the sonar screen which he couldn’t see clearly for Brentwood.
“Speed,” announced Johnson, “we got… Jesus! Thirty-two knots!”
Robert Brentwood glanced at the knot meter. The GST had a maximum of only sixteen knots submerged. It couldn’t be one of the three GSTs — had to be a torpedo. The sonar lights were blinking red.
“Two thousand yards and closing. Time to impact…” Johnson began.
“Bring the ship to zero zero niner,” ordered Brentwood, adding, “Firing point procedures. Master zero one four. Tube one.”
“Firing point procedures, master one four. Tube one,” came Johnson’s confirmation immediately, followed by, “Solution ready, sir. Weapon ready. Ship ready.”
There was no panic; this was their “line of country.”
Brentwood watched the bearing, corrected the heading, and announced, “Final bearing and shoot. Master one five.”