With most of the U.S. ‘s seventy-six F-117A Stealth fighters still in Europe, only five were immediately available to Alaskan command, the F-117A’s primary role being radar avoidance attack, not defense. Led in by a Wild Weasel F-4G Phantom jamming Big Diomede’s radars with white noise, the five Stealth fighters, despite their relatively low maneuverability-something not known by the public at large — thundered only four hundred feet above the white blur that was the eastern half of the Bering Strait.
Coming in at seven hundred miles per hour, executing both “high” and “over-the-shoulder” toss bomb release runs, they sent Paveway 2,300-pound laser-guided ordnance, along with twelve-foot-long, modular-glide bombs, sliding down the “icecream,” or laser, cone toward the eastern cliff face that sprouted retractable Flat-Face, Squat-Eye, Spoon-Rest, and Low-Blow radar arrays that serviced batteries of four barreled eighteen-inch-diameter surface-to-air missiles. Seconds after the four nose canards behind each laser seeker-detector nose assembly whistled through the dry Arctic air, their explosions lit up the face of “Ratmanov,” or Big Diomede, in crimson-curdled orange balls of fire. The thunder rolled between the two islands on the clear night, jagged sea ice reflecting the light so that Big Diomede was lit up like some huge, black-veined massif that had only suddenly burst through the frozen sea. It was an illusion created by enormous slivers of ice sliding from the island’s cliff face from the heat and the concussion of the bombs crashing into the sea ice below.
The following Aardvark, or F-111F fighter bombers, came in on the deck at 570 miles per hour to deliver their “slide” beams for more laser-guided bombs, pilots expecting to run into heavy antiaircraft fire on the approach, weapons officers centering the cross hairs on the infrared screens. Closing on the target, lasers were activated to “lock on” and, seconds before the “slide” bomb launch, the electronic warfare officers tensed, expecting heavy AA fire. But there was none. On the second approach by the F-111 fighter bombers, flying low to deliver more bombs, the aircraft presumably radar safe in the “frying pan” static set up by the F-4G Phantom Wild Weasels, Big Diomede suddenly erupted, spewing streams of red and green tracer crisscrossing the sky in deadly tattoo, the white noise now settling down so that the F-111 pilots knew that either the Wild Weasels had stopped their jamming or the Russians had outjammed the jammers.
Whatever the cause, over forty batteries of ZSU Quad twenty-three-millimeter cannon and Soviet SA-10 missiles filled the air above the strait, each gun firing over ten thousand rounds a second. The twenty-three-millimeter fire created a curtain of red-hot metal in the narrow corridor that the Wild Weasels had believed secure for a safe run in. Yet, despite the heavy AA fire, only one of the F-111 fighter bombers and one Wild Weasel were taken out, the F-111 going down, spitting flame then erupting on the ice into a thousand fiery pieces, the Weasel crashing because the intakes of its twin eighteen-thousand-pound-thrust jet engines were fouled as the plane struck a mass of terrified, glaucous-winged gulls. By now the F-111 fighter bombers had delivered their loads against the cliff face in an effort to penetrate the enclaves of the AA fire, but many of the heat-seeking missiles from the F-111s had been dummied by what photo reconnaissance later discovered were wired hot spots to sucker the heat-seeking American missiles, the Siberians’ ZSU twenty-three-millimeter and SA-10 missiles coming from relatively cooler apertures from within the sixteen-hundred-foot-high cliff face of the eleven-square-mile island.
In most danger were the five Stealth fighters. Poorly maneuverable, compared to the F-111s and Wild Weasels, and slow, at seven hundred miles per hour, the Stealth’s only superiority to the others lay in radar evasion. They sought the safety of flying practically on the deck, only two to three hundred feet above the jagged ice that was racing like an endless white runway beneath them. One, just off the northern end of Little Diomede less than two and a half miles from target, had ironically begun to climb for an over-the-shoulder toss when a wind shear created among the ice floes’ jagged peaks sucked it down for a fraction of a second. At seven hundred miles an hour the Stealth could not rise in time, and the Siberian Quads’ fire raked it from the ventral scanner below the pilot past the canopy actuator to the left-hand tail fin. It was as if a swallow’s tail had been suddenly clipped; the plane’s implosion on the ice and the detonation of the Paveway two-thousand-pounder blew a black hole in the ice, the giant eruption of flame from it illuminating the strait between the islands like some enormous charred skating rink. For an instant it was bright as day, the Siberian gunners pouring an enfilade of ZSU twenty-three millimeter fire toward it. It took a full burst, and the second Stealth was gone.
High above Big Diomede thousands more seabirds, screeching in panic, driven aloft by the shrapnel-filled night, cried even louder, some falling now, tumbling down toward the ice, either killed outright or stunned by the bombs’ explosions and AA fire. Two Siberian SA-10 missiles — radar-identified by a high-stationed, rotodomed Boeing E-3—streaked toward two of the three remaining Stealths as they banked hard right, turning north, swinging still further to an eastward heading.
There were two winks of light from Cape Prince of Wales’ Cape Mountain, and in less than five seconds two 20-foot-long, 2,200-pound U.S. Patriot land mobile surface-to-air missiles intercepted the two Soviet SA-10s, blowing them out of the sky. In the mobile command center of the Patriots in a bunker in Cape Prince of Wales the videos from the cameras of the first American wave were already being shown. The representatives from Raytheon Co. of Lexington and the Martin Marietta Corp. of Bethesda, Maryland, the prime and subcontractors for the 1.4-million-dollar-apiece Patriots, were well pleased, watching their companies being guaranteed future contracts for the 152-million-dollar Patriot’s mobile five unit system.
They were also joining in the congratulations to those pilots who had “toggled” the laser-guided bombs, via the white cross of the TV image, smack onto their selected targets, the silent, soft white bursts of light on the videos showing the smart bombs exploding. But there had been very few secondary bursts within the initial explosions, meaning no ammunition or missile dumps.
But if the contractors were pleased, the CO of Alaskan Command wasn’t. He had lost four multimillion dollar aircraft and six air crew, two each from the downed F-111 fighter bomber and the Phantom 4-G Wild Weasel, two from the Stealth fighters. And for what? If the high-frequency Russian radar hadn’t picked them up because of the earlier jamming by the Wild Weasels, then low frequency, which had been known to work on the Stealths before, must have. In any case, what was the result? he pointedly asked the hitherto exhilarated pilots. The infrared videos showed nothing more than the cliff face splattered with black, sootlike marks and splotches like white paint, clumps of old guano that had accumulated against the sixteen-hundred-foot-high granite cliff now covered in ice and snow. Yes, the bombs had landed where they were supposed to, but there was no evidence of any real damage. Where the hell were the knocked-out ZSU quads? Never mind the absence of any real damage to the SA-10 and radar array sites.
“Probably all recessed,” proffered one of the remaining F-111 weapons officers.
“Of course they’re goddamn recessed,” said the general. “They popped up long enough to get a fix on you, fired, and then they were gone, back in their holes like a bunch of prairie dogs.”
“We must have hit a few ventilator shafts, sir — that led in from the cliff. They have to breathe.”
“Hell, Captain, they could have ventilator shafts coming in from all over that island from the western side. Island’s only three miles wide. We were firing at hot spots that the videos now show were just that — hot spots. Thermal patches, each one probably run by a goddamn flashlight battery. I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it, but we’re wasting bombs, and we’ve just shot off five million bucks worth of ordnance in five seconds to shoot down missiles from sites we can’t even see.”
“Well, sir,” continued one of the two remaining Stealth captains, “we’re just going to have to get those satellite boys in Washington to get their magnifying glasses on. Has to be somewhere we can get ordnance into that sucker.”
“Time, gentlemen,” said the general urgently. “Time! The Joint Chiefs want this one taken out in a big hurry. We don’t knock out Big Diomede, we can’t cross the strait. We don’t cross the strait, and the Siberians can move everything they’ve got to their eastern flank — fifty miles from us.” The general was studying one of the video stills. “We’ll have to go in with more infrared seekers — hope some of them can fix on RHPs.” He meant residual heat patches, which theoretically should have been identified by thermal patch imaging sights even after the periscopelike radar antennae popped back down in their holes.
“Trouble is, sir, it’s so cold, RHPs’ signatures disappear on you almost immediately.”
“I know, I know. I’ll put the word out to our chief weapons officer — see whether he can crank the infrared sensors up a notch or two.”
“I’m surprised we didn’t run into any MiGs,” said the captain in charge of the Stealths.
“Maybe they don’t have any in their eastern TVD.” He meant the Siberians’ eastern theater.
“Right,” said the Stealth captain cheekily, “and I ‘m Marilyn Monroe.”
“Then come to bed, Marilyn,” said one of the weapons officers. But no one felt like laughing. The exhilaration of the attack was wearing off with the realization that six of their buddies were no more. And in the two Stealths alone, Alaska Air Command had lost 250 million dollars of the taxpayers’ money.
One thing was for damn sure, the general told his aide after the debriefing — he wasn’t going to send any more pilots against that “hunk of rock” until he could loosen it up a bit by “other means.” By which he meant that, despite NORAD’s insistence that the attack on Ratmanov not siphon off any aircraft from the continent’s vital North American defense line, he would request that a B-1 bomber be released from its blastproof shelter six hundred feet above sea level to launch air-to-ground 86-B cruise missiles at the rock.
Firing the three-thousand-pound, two-thousand-mile-range missile outside the Siberians’ effective air-to-surface missile envelope from a distance of between forty and fifty miles would be like hitting the rock at point-blank range. If that didn’t shake a few things loose, granite fortress and all, he didn’t know what would. He could, of course, wait for more bombers to be released from Europe, but this was unlikely now that they had to contend with containing the Siberian west flank. And the air commander knew that if he couldn’t shake up Big Diomede— and quickly — knocking out its radar, AA, and no doubt its surface-to-ship missile batteries, he would have to yield the job to the navy. He was right.
The Tomcats aboard USS Salt Lake City with their 14,500 pounds of ordnance on four underfuselage points and two wing hard points were even now taking their turn as squat, bright yellow mules — tractors — positioned them ready for the four waist and bow catapults. The Alaskan air commander was too much of a professional to let petty interservice rivalry with the navy stand in the way of an operation’s success. Still…
In the backseat of the lead Tomcat, Frank Shirer’s RIO, his radar intercept officer, Walter B. Anderson, a twenty-four-year-old from Wisconsin, raised his thumb, signalling the red-jacketed ordnance men that he had seen all the red-ribboned safety pins extracted from the bomb racks. Now through the white blaze of steam-curtained light, shadows of yellow- and green-jacketed men darted about the bow and waist cats and blast deflectors — the twin, bluish white cones of the Tomcat’s Pratt and Whitney TF-30 engines going into the high scream of a forty-thousand-pound thrust. Shirer saw the yellow jacket drop, left knee on the deck, left hand tucked up behind his back, right arm fully extended. “Go!”
Shirer braced himself. There was an enormous hiss. Shirer felt himself slammed back into his seat, saw a blur of deck lights, felt a rush like a long feather pulling through his rectum, involuntarily ejaculated, and was hurled aloft at 180 miles per hour, the carrier deck a yellow postage stamp sliding away downhill into the darkness behind him.
Shirer was already feeling nostalgic for the Tomcat. After this he would be transferred to shore duty at Elmendorf, navy fighters being used to fill the NORAD gap. It would mean he’d have more opportunity to be with Lana, but he liked carriers — they kept moving. Now, however, all thoughts of Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, her beauty, her fear of her husband, Jay La Roche, a wife-beater and psychopath all rolled into one behind the respectable exterior, had to be put aside as Shirer, leader of the twelve Tomcats, headed toward Ratmanov Island, their offset aiming point the quarter-mile-high Fairway Rock twelve miles south of their target.
Shirer’s F-14, coming in over the ice pack, led the attack, diving into the slot of the Bering Strait where the blip of Ratmanov was already on his target scope, magnified by the second. Then the Arctic night came alive with streams of red and green tracer, not shot higgledy-piggledy, Shirer noted, as in the Baghdad raids he’d been on, but carefully vectored toward the ten-plane arrowhead formation. His RIO, Anderson, reported that he had a cluster of Siberian Spoon-Rest radar masts on the eastern cliff of Ratmanov in the cross hairs of the green infrared screen. He switched on the laser designator beam and in less than a second informed Shirer they had a “lock-on”; in another second two-thousand-pound dumb bombs fitted with Paveway conversion kits, turning them into smart weapons, were sliding down the beam. At the same time six batteries of quad-mounted ZSU-23s opened up along the cliff, sending swarms of sixty-five-round-per-second, thirty-millimeter fire at the American jets. Faster eighteen-foot-long SA-10 missiles followed, the Siberian radar having got a radar fix.
“We’ve been painted,” warned Anderson. The missiles, at over forty-two hundred miles an hour travelling faster than a rifle bullet, were streaking toward the American formation.
The F-14s began evasive measures, but Shirer’s Tomcat was hit as it rose sharply before a dark cleft in the cliff erupting with massed machine-gun fire, the Tomcat’s wings going into the swept position for more maneuver, its turbofans screaming on afterburner. Shirer felt a shudder. The tail actuators were severed.
“Eject! Eject!” he yelled. Anderson pulled the eject handle. There was a bang, the explosive bolts disengaging.
Knowing his RIO was out, Shirer pulled his eject and the next moment was shot out in the rocket-assisted Martin-Baker ejector seat. The freezing Arctic wind howled about him as he reached the apogee of the thrust. He began to fall, heard the snap of the chute opening, and in flickering flare light spotted Anderson below, off to his left, as they descended toward the snow-covered southern end of the high, rocky island.
They had been illuminated by the flare light for only a second or two, but it was enough for the six-man troop of the elite Russian SPETS commandos, who, unseen by the Americans, came up out of their deep, rock-roofed tunnel complex and, invisible because of their white winter overlays against the snow, ran with the controlled pace of top athletes. Despite their heavy weapon load, they continued sprinting toward the island’s narrower, southern end.
Anderson, from the downed Tomcat, had barely finished wrapping up his chute when Shirer quickly released himself from the chute before it could drag him over the seventeen-hundred-foot-high edge of the cliff. The SPETS were almost upon them.
“Ne dvigat’sya!”— “Don’t move!” Neither the pilot nor his RIO knew a word of Siberian, but they understood the lead commando’s shouted command, and stood, hands raised.
The first two commandos knelt, covering them with their AK-74s. As per regulation, at least one of the elite SPETS troop, the tail-end Charlie, spoke English — and without a trace of an accent. “What airfield are you from?” he asked them both, his gaze settling on Shirer who, despite the fact that the Russian was only several feet away, couldn’t make out the commando’s face beneath the dark makeup and the hood of the white overlay.
“My name is Franklin G. Shirer. My rank is colonel in the U.S. Navy. My service number is—”
“Who’s the senior officer?” snapped the Russian commando, his infrared goggles giving him a grotesque, bug-eyed, alien appearance.
“I am,” Shirer told him.
“You!” said the commando, turning immediately to the RIO. “What airfield are you from?”
“My name is Captain Walter B.—”
“Vozmite ego!”—”Take him!” ordered the commando. Two of the other SPETS grabbed the captain. Shirer instinctively moved to help and felt himself lifted off the ground, the pain hitting a moment later, the blow to his stomach winding him so acutely that despite the howl of the wind moaning across the icy crust of the island, he could hear himself gasping hoarsely, his windpipe making a rasping sound as he struggled for breath. Amid the flashes of the Siberian ZSU-23 quads and streams of tracer gracefully arcing and climbing skyward he glimpsed his RIO at the edge of the cliff. “What airfield?” shouted one of the Russians holding him. Anderson wouldn’t answer. The next second he was gone off the cliff, his screams quickly lost beneath the loud rattle of the Siberians’ AA quads.
“Jesus!” shouted Shirer. “You bastards—” A SPETS hit him again, and he blacked out.
The navy’s air attacks from the Salt Lake City were fierce, fearless, and ineffective. The only thing that they achieved was a pervasive sense among the Siberian tunnel garrison of the superiority of their “Saddam Bunker” defensive measures-lessons learned from the Iraqis’ experience during the massive American and Allied bombing of ‘91.
Even if the starye perduny—”old feats”—in Russia’s Frunze Military Academy had not absorbed the experiences relayed to them by their pupils, the Republican Guard survivors, the lesson of the logistical brilliance of the Americans had been duly recorded by the Soviets’ Liberation Army Daily.
It was not so much the lesson of the U.S.’s “Smart” bombs, as, despite the propaganda spread about by what Novosibirsk called the unwitting dupes of the Western media, the Americans’ laser-guided weapons constituted only 7 percent of the total bombs dropped, the remainder being World War II iron bombs, some of these turned into GBU — guided bomb units— with the Pave penny laser seeker conversion kits. No, it was the logistical capability, the “tooth to tail” supply lines feeding and in general maintaining over a quarter-million men and machines with everything they needed, from 5.56 rifle rounds, HEAT (high explosive antitank) rounds, Starlight infrared night vision goggles, condoms (to reduce the 14 percent VD casualty rate of most armies), and MRE (meals ready to eat) trays, warmed by body heat alone, to toothpaste and toilet paper.
This logistical capability of the Americans was, in the Siberians’ eyes, the real victor of Desert Storm, as the Siberians believed that, man for man, their troops, raised, born, and trained in the Arctic, were far tougher than the American and British allies. The Americans were superb at organization and improvisation, the commanding officer, Lieutenant General Dracheev, pointed out to his two-thousand-man Ratmanov garrison, and the American capability was seared into the psyches of the entire garrison. The Siberians, in their “Saddam” tunnel complex, now moved with a well-oiled efficiency, as if some vast collective unconscious had risen from within the great rock to insulate them between Ratmanov and the Smart bomb attacks.
Only in two places, the northeastern end of the island and through a clutch of radar antennae, whose bases had become dislodged before they were able to be retracted far enough, did shrapnel from the Allied bombs permeate, killing eight men and wounding a score more. Even so, the integrity of the rock proved anew the feet, grudgingly conceded by the U.S. Air Force and the pilots of the navy Tomcats and the beloved Grumman A-6E Intruders, with their eighteen-thousand-pound bomb loads coming in from Salt Lake City, that aerial bombardment, though it might cause jaw-splitting headaches, toshnota—”nausea”— from “shock wave multiples,” and blurring of one’s vision, could not win against, or even dislodge, the deeply dug keepers in the oil-cushioned “Saddam” bunkers of Ratmanov Island.
Lieutenant General Dracheev, who knew that the sole reason for the Ratmanov garrison’s existence was to remain an immovable threat and obstacle to the Americans, obviating the need for Novosibirsk to risk precious aircraft over the strait, felt secure in his control bunker. Halfway down the island, it had been dug one hundred feet into the solid rock, three hundred feet in from the eastern cliff face.
He peered at the night sky though his infrared periscope, which could be used at either the level he was now standing, sixty feet below the surface of solid rock, or two levels further down in Control at the hundred-foot level. Seeing no sign of enemy activity and assured by his radar controllers that no air traffic could be detected in the local area of the Diomedes, Dracheev headed down toward his bunker from the first periscope level.
The concrete stairwell was watched over by a KPV Vladimirov heavy machine gun post, only part of its 135-centimeter-long barrel visible in the ball turret mounted in the door. At the machine gun the reinforced concrete stairwell took a downward-sloping U-turn to yet another closed door. Here, at the second of the three levels, another machine-gun inset had to be swung open to allow the commander and his aides into this eighty-foot level of the hundred-foot-deep bunker. The floor was a two-foot-thick antidetonator slab of reinforced concrete and high tensile steel. The next flight of stairs led to the air lock, in the event of chemical attack, outside the main command bunker at the one-hundred-foot level. All three levels were separated by at least ten feet of rock. The upper level contained a SPETS guard detachment, whose dormitories, canteen, and bunks were on the second level, which also contained all communications consoles, a conference room, and two bedrooms for Lieutenant General Dracheev and his aide, a SPETS colonel.
The lowest level was comprised of electricity generators, water tanks, along with air, water, and sewage filtration units. Other nuclear shelters like it had been built, but this command post had earned its name as a “Saddam” bunker because it had pressure-pumped, quick-setting, rubberized cement poured beneath it as well, filling every nook and cranny at the base of the enormous command center with what was effectively a hard, rubberized foundation four feet thick that even extended five to six feet outside the bunker to fill the gaps between the hewn-out rock shaft and man-made steel walls of the deep, rectangular bunker. This allowed it not only to withstand the shock waves of a nuclear burst but also to “move” on the rubberized foundation in the event of earthquakes and other natural realignments that radiated out from the inherently unstable Aleutian chain.
The Allies had heard rumors of such bunkers for years — ever since the Iraqi war, when they had failed to get Saddam as he moved from bunker to bunker. The Allies were better acquainted with the layout of the Siberian bunkers for the troops. It was a fundamentally simple design, combining the best German engineering with the best British steel to create a series of interlocking H-shaped “pipe tunnel” garrison complexes drilled out of the basalt.
The complexes, one deep below the northern half of the island, the other beneath the southern half, consisted of a series of prefabricated high-tensile steel “sewer pipe” tubes or rooms leading off from a connecting cylindrical tunnel corridor to form an H. Each of the sewer-pipe-shaped chambers was a one-hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-diameter barracks containing at least one hundred troops, who slept on fold-down bunks at the ends of the tube. It was an astonishingly cost-effective and efficient design, borrowed from the Federation of Nuclear Shelter Consultants and Contractors. Each H unit was only one hundred and fifty feet from end to end and barely two hundred feet left to right. An extra twenty feet of concrete extended from either side as an added margin of protection for the tubular barracks. In twenty H barracks, ten north of his command bunker, ten south, Dracheev housed a thousand troops together with a sick bay and kitchen stacked with dried foods. The air vents were cleverly concealed at surface level in natural rock chimneys and fissures all equipped with chemical attack filters. Dracheev’s command bunker, while midway between the two, was not connected by the usual ten-foot-diameter, tubular, bombproof corridor but a narrow two-and-a-half-foot-diameter crawl pipe so that in the event of the island’s secure, buried land lines somehow being cut and radiotelephone links severed between the three elements, communications could be shuttled by the use of runners. The tunnel was only wide enough for one man at a time.
Though neither the British nor the Americans knew the extent of Ratmanov’s subterranean defenses, Freeman, en route to Alaska, doubted that the Russians would have failed to make any garrison as bombproof as possible, so that even as the B-1 bomber with its short-range attack missiles taxied down Elmendorf runway, Freeman was addressing himself to the problem. “Dick—” From force of habit he looked behind him to speak to Colonel Dick Norton, who had served as his aide in Europe and whom he had requested for this operation, momentarily forgetting he was still en route from Europe. “Reach, isn’t it?” he asked the young major who’d been appointed by the Pentagon as his interim aide.
“Ready and waiting, sir.”
“I want Three Soc up here and deployed at Cape Prince of Wales, ready for disembarkation in twenty-four hours.” Three Soc — Special Operations Capable — was the name for the twenty-two-hundred-man marine expeditionary unit, the smallest MAGTAF — Marine air-ground task force — unit out of Camp Smith, Hawaii, based on the Pacific Fleet’s Salt Lake City carrier.
“Yes, sir,” answered Reach, but even as he conveyed the order to one of the 727’s console operators for encoding he wondered aloud to Freeman whether it wouldn’t be better to collect the FMPac’s Hawaii-based marine expeditionary brigade. It was a force of almost sixteen thousand: fifteen thousand marines and five hundred and fifty navy, medical, and support liaison staff, in turn supported by forty Marine A-V/8 Harrier fighter bomber jump jets, F-18s, forty-seven assorted amphibious vehicles, troop-carrying hovercraft, and a hundred helicopters.
“Hell—” said Freeman, watching their ETA for Elmendorf Air Force Base change on the computer screen due to strong polar winds. “We’re not going ice skating.” The general could see Reach still didn’t get it.
“It won’t be amphibious, Dick — ah, I mean Reach. Johnny, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it won’t be amphibious, John. I want airborne. And fast.”
“Airborne!” said Reach. “A chopper assault?”
“What? Hell, no,” responded Freeman. “Siberians’d pick ‘em off those heavy assault Chinooks like flies with their SAMs. I mean HALO — high-altitude, low-opening chutes. Drop ‘em right on that goddamn Rat Island before the Rats know what’s hit ‘em. Anyone drifts off target — they’ll be all right. Wait on the ice until later. Marine choppers can pick ‘em up after they’ve taken in the MEV to mop up.”
Major Reach was astonished by Freeman’s plan, as was the British brigadier, now being apprised of Freeman’s request for a seventy-man squadron of joint British/American troops from the SAS — Special Air Service — unit out of Hereford in Wales, the same unit in which David Brentwood, Lana Brentwood’s younger brother, had so distinguished himself during the SAS’s breaching of Moscow’s innermost defenses.
“But General,” protested Reach, “don’t you think the hovercraft amphibians could launch an assault against the island? They have infrared, high-resolution optics—”
“No, I don’t. Pressure ridges between the Alaskan mainland and Diomedes stretch the full twenty-five miles. That’s no goddamned hockey rink out there, Reach. You ought to know that. It’s pack ice — thirty feet thick and rougher’n Granny’s tits. Up and down, movin’ all about. Those hovercraft’d get a good run going on that air cushion, then bang! An ice ridge, big as a house. Besides, it’d be a turkey shoot for those Rat batteries. Might as well give ‘em invitations to a ball. No, Major, I want the best parachute troops we’ve got.”
“Why don’t we call Fort Campbell?” suggested Reach. “Hundred and First Airborne. Get them and their 105 howitzers aboard those big C-141s. They could be up here within twenty-four hours. Or we could get the Eighty-Second Airborne’s Ready Brigade out of Fort Bragg?”
Douglas Freeman looked sternly at Reach. The young major seemed amiable enough, but two things about him were bothering the general. The first was that Reach either didn’t know or had forgotten that the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne were now only air mobile, no longer a parachute-delivered force, despite the retention of their gung ho title. The second thing was that Reach didn’t know the Eighty-Second Airborne were still in Europe, trying, along with the Brits and U.S. Ranger battalions, to penetrate the Ural Mountains on Siberia’s west flank. In any event, the marine expeditionary unit wasn’t to be a spearhead but would only go in after, if the SAS and any other special forces Freeman could dig up could first “unplug,” in the general’s words, “the Rat’s maze” that was Big Diomede.
“Reach?”
“Sir?”
“You’re fired! Don’t know a goddamn thing about the ice, and you still think the Eighty-Second is in North Carolina. You also think the One-Oh-One uses chutes. Nothing personal, Major, but I can’t afford to have you around. You don’t do your homework. You get yourself back to G-2. Bury yourself in Siberiana, and if God’s with you, you’ll get a second chance with me. But not against Rat Island. Your ignorance is too damned dangerous, son.”
In the silence between the Boeing’s banks of electronic consoles all that could be heard was the Boeing itself, its four twenty-one-thousand-pound Pratt and Whitney engines in a steady roar as if endorsing the general’s decision.
By the time the Royal Canadian Air Force F-18s from NORAD, released by headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain to escort the general’s plane for the second half of his journey to Alaska, were high over the Rockies in Alberta, Major John Reach’s unorthodox firing was known to everyone aboard the Boeing and among ground operators from Anchorage to Nome. Freeman hoped it would sweep right through Alaska Command, especially through the twenty-two hundred men of the MEU and to every pilot aboard the MEU’s four Apache attack choppers and those who would be driving the sixteen CH-46 and CH-53 medium- and heavy-lift assault transport choppers, to every man and woman associated with Operation Arctic Front, that old Hardass Freeman was back. Besides, if he didn’t take Rat Island, the Pentagon’d fire him. If he didn’t take it, he’d fire himself.
Freeman called Fort Bragg to ask for two of the remaining one-hundred-man Delta Force companies, the best combination of demolition, radio, and hand-to-hand specialists who, with their blood brothers, the SAS, would go in first.
However, Delta Force command, even drafting instructors from its Shooting House — used for antiterrorist training at Bragg — could come up with only seventy men at most, only as many as the SAS would have, the remaining SAS and Delta Force already in action trying to take out the Siberian prepo sites — giant ammunition and fuel dumps — believed hidden and well-camouflaged in the Urals. Most of these were American and British commandos from SAS and Delta Force who in ‘91 had been dropped behind the lines during the Iraqi war looking for the kind of upgraded Scuds that some Moslem fundamentalist groups were now threatening to use against the British and American southern command that was spread out between the Black and Caspian seas.
With SAS and Delta Force commandos combined Freeman would have only one hundred and fifty men at most to throw in on the HALO jump, but with what he had in mind — a quick, unexpected spearhead attack by the superbly trained British and American commandos — it might be enough. To bolster that confidence, he had personally requested that the survivors of the SAS raid into Moscow — especially young David Brentwood, who also had the experience of the Pyongyang raid behind him— be included in the attack.
Freeman also insisted Big Diomede be referred to as Rat Island because of the danger of mixing up Big Diomede and Little Diomede in the maze of radio transmits that would fill the air once the assault was underway, and that if the Siberians were stupid enough to risk sending troops across the ice to assault Little Diomede’s Patriot antiballistic missile batteries, the batteries should be destroyed. The last thing Freeman said he wanted was casualties from “shorts” or AD — accidental discharge — that is, friendly fire. He knew better than most soldiers that up to 12 percent of all casualties would result from friendly fire anyway. After D-Day in July ‘44, the U.S. breakout from Rommel’s beachhead defenses into the bocage—the open hedgerow country — had been seriously delayed because of “shorts.” “Second Household Cavalry,” he told his new interim aide, “suffered more casualties preparing for D-Day than they suffered in the first four months after D-Day. You believe that?”
“Ah — yes. I don’t know, sir.”
“It’s true, all right,” said Freeman.
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know,” said the aide, still unnerved by Reach’s dismissal.
“No reason you should, Captain,” Freeman assured him.
“But just about every possibility in war has already been thought of. Trick is to think of it again.” Freeman smiled. “You read your history, Captain. It’s all in there.” Freeman steathed himself against the buffeting of a wind shear that suddenly sucked the plane down in a gut-wrenching plunge. All the while his gaze remained fixed on the play-dough model of Ratmanov that he’d made up after ordering four loaves of bread from the gallery, squeezing the bread into the tooth shape of the island.
“Course,” said Freeman, “there’s always the surprise factor.” Rule of thumb told him that for any assault on the island to stand a ghost of a chance he should have a five-to-one advantage, but then again that’s just what the Siberians would expect from the Americans — a massive chopper-borne attack.
Everything came down to a matter of speed — the kind of speed the black-hooded SAS had used on May 6, 1980, “cleaning out” the Iranian Embassy, taking out all the terrorists, and rescuing the hostages in eleven minutes flat — with the kind of professionalism and hair-trigger expertise that young Brentwood and his SAS troop had penetrated the Kremlin’s defenses. Suddenly Freeman was gripped by a bowel-chilling fear. He recalled the report of at least two navy flyers going down. They had ejected safely, but no ID flares appeared, though they would have shown up brilliantly against the snow if the flyers had had time to activate them. Which meant that the moment his SAS/Delta Force airborne troops landed, enemy troops might well be ready to swarm up and out like cockroaches, bringing the battle to the Allied force before any of the British or Americans had landed.”What we need against those rats,” said Freeman, “is a big can of Raid! Get the Elmendorf — the air commander.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the young captain contacted Elmendorf he tried to figure out what the general was up to. You had to start figuring things out with Freeman; otherwise the hardass would come down on you like a ton of bricks. As he heard Freeman outlining his latest brain wave to Elmendorf, the captain couldn’t help thinking there were a lot of guys who’d like to see Hardass on the end of the first chute.
After the call Freeman seemed more relaxed, even if preoccupied. His calm blue eyes now fixed on the dough model like a chess player, noting again how the island sloped steeply westward from the seventeen-hundred-foot-high eastern cliffs. You could go around the island — come in the back door — but the island was so small (five miles long and three miles at its widest) that it didn’t matter where you landed a combined SAS/Delta team of a hundred and forty men, providing they didn’t land too close to the cliff’s edge. As the general stared at the cliffs of his makeshift model, he was no longer aboard the Boeing but back at Monte Casino, where the Nazi troops, reinforced by SS commandos, held off the attacking Allies for weeks. Weeks were something Freeman knew he couldn’t afford. Every day lost was another day that the Siberians could use to reinforce their far eastern flank. It had to be a complete surprise after the air force had roughed up the Rat’s nest with their cruise missiles.
Running his hand through a shock of graying hair, Freeman kept his gaze on the model, trying to think what the Siberian commander would do if the cruise missile attack didn’t do the trick and if the Siberian anticipated an airborne invasion. Hopefully the missiles would knock out the island’s main defenses from the sheer shock of the explosions. A piece of crust — part of the cliff’s edge — was swelling as the cabin pressure altered during the Boeing’s descent, then fell off.
“We should be so lucky, eh, General?” said the captain, handing him a coffee. “They say the SPETS are their upper crust, General.”
“Yes,” answered Freeman. He sounded morose. Suddenly feeling all eyes on him, as if every console operator on the Boeing had suddenly become unnerved by his tone, Freeman adopted an airy, friendly mood. “You know what the upper crust is, gentlemen?” he asked, immediately answering his own question. “Lot of crumbs stuck together with dough!”
A few laughs, some groans.
“You’re right. It’s awful. All right then — how about this? Guy comes home and his wife points to the light bulb and says, ‘That bulb’s been flickering on and off all day. It’s not the bulb — it must be the wiring or something. Will you fix it?’
“ ‘Do I look like an electrician?’ says the guy and flops down in front of the TV. ‘Get an electrician.’
“Next day he comes home and she tells him the tap in the basement is dripping — driving her nuts. Will he fix it? ‘Hey— do I look like a plumber?’ he says and flops back down in front of the TV. Next night he comes home, the light’s working fine— and no more dripping tap.
“ ‘You did it yourself!’ he says.
“ ‘No,’ she answers. ‘That young guy down the lane out of work. He fixed them.’
“ ‘What’d he charge?’
‘“I asked him, and he said he didn’t want any money. Either I could go to bed with him or bake him a cake.’
“ ‘Geez!’ says the husband. ‘Hope you baked him a cake!’ and she says, ‘Do I look like Betty Crocker?’ “
Laughter was mixed with the whine of the undercarriage going down. Buckling up, Freeman turned to his interim aide. “You know what causes the largest percentage of pre-invasion casualties, son?”
“Airborne, sir?”
“If you like.”
“Practice jumps, sir. Chutes that don’t open,” replied the captain. “Friendly fire.”
“Vehicle accidents,” said Freeman. “Most of our young Turks are under twenty-four, Captain. Drive like maniacs. Any man convicted on a speed or reckless-driving offense answers to me — personally — and his CO pays the fine: five hundred dollars. Got it?”
“Five hundred dollars, General?”
“First offense. A grand for the second.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one, sir.”
Freeman nodded.
“Now when we reach Cape Prince of Wales, Dick Norton, my aide from Europe, will take over your job in my HQ. I want you to understand there’s nothing personal in this. It’s just that we’ve got very little time to spring this thing, and Dick and I’ve worked before. Planned the SAS Moscow raid. Understand?”
“Yes, sir. No problem.”
The young captain was enormously relieved. Rumor was that when you worked for Freeman it was a steam bath: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on call every second, and God help you if you screwed up. Only man that worked harder than Freeman’s aide, they said, was Freeman himself.
“But—” continued Freeman, “to stress that I’ve full confidence in you, son, you’re invited along for the jump.” In a rush — like the feeling when he’d slithered down the bannister when he was a boy — cold-bowel fear struck the captain. Freeman was going to take the airborne in himself. Given his reputation in the Pyongyang raid and the fact that the general had led the Allies’ armored breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was.
“Dick Norton,” said Freeman happily, “is gonna have a pup! Goddamn, he hates flying. Course,” said Freeman confidently, “I’ll need him to stay behind to coordinate the MEU follow-up. He’ll come in after in the choppers. But I’ll kid him a bit. You watch his face, Captain. Go white as flour — sort of like yours.” He slapped the captain heartily.”Just kidding, son. No one’s going in who hasn’t had HALO training. You come in with the choppers, too.” The captain’s legs felt weak.
As the wheels hit then grabbed the tarmac, Freeman saw the drops of condensation on his window, wind-driven into long tears. “Just hope to Christ that that Siberian son of a bitch isn’t anticipating an airborne assault. Course it won’t be necessary if that big bird from Elmendorf does its job.”