On the lower decks of the Wasp-class helo-carrier-transport Yorktown, the Marine Expeditionary Unit, under the command of Colonel Jack Tibbet, was being assembled. The air was thick with the smell of oil and the shuddering roar of engines and giant exhaust fans as Tibbet’s marines reviewed last-minute details prior to going topside to hear the mission commander, General Freeman, give his pre-op address. There was an understandable expectation that the general, if not being outright contrite after the humiliation of losing the terrorists’ trail, would at least be apologetic about having to put the MEU in harm’s way because of his foul-up at Priest Lake back home. In both the foreign anti-American press and the left-of-center liberal press at home, he was being portrayed, despite his earlier accomplishments and battle honors, as a “loser.”
As he slowly, reluctantly, shuffled his way in the confusion of the lower deck toward the elevator, young Peter Norton, the son of Robert Norton, Freeman’s former second-in-command from his Russia days, was one of those marines who weren’t looking forward to what must be the general’s mea culpa. To have the terrorists’ “AMERICANS SUCK” note flashed around the world by Al Jazeera was bad enough, but to have the man who had failed the mission bare himself in front of the men and women he was now expected to lead fearlessly into battle was something that no marine wanted to either hear or witness. It was a violation of strict marine tradition to go into a battle zone under anyone but their own, even if Freeman was an ex — full general of the army.
But if there was one thing that the American-led war against terrorism all over the world had taught the marines and every other branch of the armed services, it was that traditional ways of doing things often had to be overruled in the interest of expediency. Yorktown was the nearest MEU ready to go; it had been as simple as that.
There was a somber mood throughout the ship and little of the light banter that normally preceded an MEU op. Everyone knew that Freeman’s foray into this rebel-held Russian territory could be Freeman’s Folly if what was euphemistically referred to as “unsettled weather” conspired with the crack Russian defenders whose forebears, in their ubiquitous T-34s, had stopped the German Panzers in the terrible massed winter battles of 1943 and 1944.
Peter Norton, harboring the chilling possibility of having to drive his 6,000-pound cargo-carrying Hummer in the vicinity of the rebel Russian tanks, was in the grip of an ice-cold fear. Having been demoted from full-combat-marine status to combat driver, he was depressed enough already without having to think about being thrust into or anywhere near a heavily defended enemy position. He had begun experiencing the chest-gripping, profuse-sweating, “I’m going to die” anxiety attacks a few months before. Out of concern for his own well-being and as a machine gunner aboard one of the MEU’s ground team’s armored Hummers, he had dutifully reported to sick bay, and the panic attacks had quickly been brought under control by a daily dose of ten milligrams of the anti-anxiety medication Paxil. But he had not been sufficiently alert to the fact that the navy, into whose organization the marines were integrated, remains the most tradition-bound of the armed services. As well as being the most “senior” service, it remains deeply suspicious of “shrinks,” whether they be psychologists or psychiatrists. In Peter Norton’s case, the navy was even more rattled by the acronym PIUS — possible instability under stress.
Peter hadn’t told any of his marine buddies about his connection with Freeman. Nor had he tried to use his father or Freeman, who it was unlikely even knew he was on the Yorktown, to pull strings to overturn the damning psychological profile that he was sure had cost him promotion and a reduction in pay. When he heard the criticism of Freeman aboard Yorktown, Peter was even more convinced that he had done the right thing in not owning up to any connection to the man whom most of Peter’s marine buddies resented having been placed in overall command of the MEU. But he did regret reporting the panic attacks. Though nothing was said to him directly, Norton found his responsibilities further decreased, and when the mission was announced, his official designation was no longer combat driver but standby support driver. And the only reason he had been assigned this job as a food-supply driver in Colonel Tibbet’s battalion HQ was that the armed forces were spread so thinly in the far-flung world war against terrorism that all trained personnel, including drivers, were scarce.
In the tightly packed, claustrophobic, fuel-laden atmosphere on the vehicle decks he was finding it difficult to breathe. He felt the old, chest-gripping fear rising in him and, as a psychological diversionary tactic, began checking his stack of dark brown, plastic-wrapped MAMEs, marine meals, which, as cold rations designed out of the marine battle lab in Quantico, Virginia, were far superior to the usual MREs, meals ready-to-eat, which troops frequently threw away because what the MREs provided in nutrients, they lacked in taste. Colonel Tibbet passed by, the tall, lean marine commanding officer, nodding to Norton on his way. Then he stopped and turned on his heel. “Norton? Peter Norton? Right?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Peter, with some timidity.
“You were the guy who suggested we stock up on — what was it, Mars bars, for the next combat ration?”
“Yessir,” replied Peter obediently, then typically added, “but it wasn’t my idea, sir. It was General Freeman’s.”
“Freeman’s?” said Tibbet with obvious surprise. “You know General Freeman?”
“No, sir. Well, not personally, but he sent a memo to the quartermaster general after he’d found out how the Brits on the ships during the Falklands War passed on all their rations and went instead for Mars bars.”
Tibbet was nodding knowingly. “Huh — sugar surge, I guess. Makes sense. But General Freeman should’ve recommended Hershey bars.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tibbet moved on toward the TOW anti-tank-missile-loaded Humvees that would be airlifted by one of the Yorktown’s Super Stallions, unless there was interference in the assemblage of the air force from the Yorktown by foreign aircraft. In such a case the Yorktown’s marine V-STOL Harriers would provide a potent protective screen for the MEU force. The Harriers were tasked with going in to destroy what the MEU S-2 intel chief had been convinced by McCain’s signal exploitation space and by HUMINT routed to the McCain by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and the Shanghai trade office was a Russian complex near Lake Khanka and its marshlands.
There was a problem, however, with the SATPIX. It showed an H-shaped building but no anti-aircraft emplacements, and a mobile AA battery was everyone’s nightmare on such an op — that is, one of the nightmares.
It was General Freeman’s comment about the unusual number of airborne birds cluttering the satellite images of the area that had first aroused the MEU’s intel chief’s interest. Freeman had pointed out to him that the fact of the birds constantly rising, circling, and landing on the lake—“neurotically,” Freeman had said — pointed to a terrestrial anomaly that “must be frightening the shit out of the cranes, et cetera,” causing them to take flight much more often than what an ornithological report confirmed was normal. If there was an earthquake, Freeman had told the officers’ mess on Yorktown, the entire area would liquefy.
“It’s liquefied already, General.”
“True. What I meant, Captain, was that even the wooded areas that we might rely on would simply become a vast slurry. Awful for armor.” What spooked the marines’ intel officer most was the sheer volume of bird traffic being monitored in the “blue tile country,” the blue-tiled inner sanctum of the U.S.S. McCain’s signal exploitation space compared to what was normal. “Neurotic,” he decided, was an apt description of the avian activity.
Now Colonel Tibbet was inspecting the line of Stinger-mounted Humvees. Two swivel-mounted boxes on each one of the ten vehicles contained four anti-aircraft missiles, eight Stingers in all, a potent defense system by any measure. After a quick inspection of these units, he walked quickly past the supply Humvees which, because his mission was not an amphibious-landing op as such, would have to be delivered, together with extra fuel bladders, by helo sling and would have to carry the total supply load, from prepackaged meals to gas masks, a job usually shared by the marines’ five-ton trucks which the Yorktown’s big landing craft ferried ashore after the troops disembarked. But this KITDO, or kick-in-the-door operation, as the troops called it, to Lake Khanka was to be confined to airlift only. Tibbet was about to leave the vehicle deck and walk up one of the many internal ramps between decks to the big hangar, when he paused and called back to Peter Norton, “How’d you know it was General Freeman who sent that memo?”
“My dad told me, sir.”
“Your dad?”
“Yes, sir. He used to be the general’s 2IC.”
“Huh!” said Tibbet, wondering why the son of a G-2 hadn’t risen any higher than a driver. No shame in it, but not what you’d expect.
General Freeman’s stentorian voice coming on the Yorktown’s public address system sounded as if it was coming from on high, its tone brooking neither interruption nor contradiction.
“Shit,” opined one marine. “Sounds like Moses.”
This is no apology, Peter Norton told himself. This was an old blood ’n’ guts Georgie Patton speech. And what made it doubly impressive or eerie, depending on the audience of two thousand marines scattered throughout the ship, was Freeman’s likeness on the monitors to the controversial World War II general.
“Reincarnation,” said a machine gunner.
“Bullshit,” responded another. “What d’you think, Norton?”
Peter shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“It’s going around town,” boomed the general, “that I’m a ‘tired old horse’! Now, I take umbrage at that. I’ve been a horse’s ass, but I’ve never been ‘old’!” There was a smattering of laughter ’tween decks and on the Yorktown’s roof, where the flight crews in the preemptory ballet of war were busily parking the first five of the helo carrier’s fifteen big Super Stallions, the choppers in takeoff line, rotors still, folded like the wings of enormous, sleeping dragonflies. “What makes it worse,” continued Freeman, “is that the joker who said I’m a horse’s ass was a liberal Monday-morning quarterbacking son of a bitch who wouldn’t know a condom from a balloon.”
The marines roared their approval, getting into it now. Marine Commander Tibbet, high up on the island’s bridge, was shaking his head as he stared down at Freeman who, he saw, had climbed atop one of the big Super Stallion’s cockpits, even as its deck crew fit-tested the helo’s cargo hook and banana-shaped sling.
“That comment about liberals’ll be on CNN in about five minutes,” Tibbet complained to Yorktown’s diminutive Captain Crowley. “The man’s got no sense of — I don’t know—”
Why, Lord, why, Crowley petitioned Heaven, did he have to have George Patton reincarnated on his boat? A naval captain, like anyone else, abhorred controversy. Technically, Crowley mused, as long as Freeman’s on my boat, he’s under my command. Technically.
“Now,” continued Freeman, “I want to tell you men and women that if I were you, I’d be a mite teed off at suddenly being under the command of a horse’s ass!” A roar of laughter erupted ’tween decks, flowing up from the vehicle and hangar deck over the ramps, spilling out onto the flight deck. “But I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen my share of combat, and I’ve still got some ideas about how to deal with scumbags. And—” He was interrupted by another roar, this one of such anger that it startled Yorktown’s captain but turned Colonel Tibbet’s frown into a knowing smile: Their blood was up. “—And I want to tell you,” thundered the general, “that I and my team of veterans are here to work with you, not over you. This is from first to last Colonel Tibbet’s show. I’m here in an advisory capacity only, but you’ll see me around—” He paused. “—not sitting like a horse’s ass, but galloping in with your Super Stallions. And—”
There was clapping and cries of “Way to go, General!”
“And,” continued Freeman, arms akimbo, his camouflaged Fritz with its airborne strap cupping his chin, “I intend to shit all over those comrades who give our enemies the means to kill our children. Are you ready?”
“Hoo-ha!” came the guttural marine response.
“God bless you all,” Freeman told them, “and God bless America!”
The cheers of the marines were now interrupted by the coughing, spitting noise of the helicopter engines starting in unison, their collective roar amid the choking exhaust fumes drowning out the war cries of the first wave of 750 marines to embark on the mission which Freeman had suggested should be called Operation Bird Rescue. The president had thought it a brilliant choice, so politically astute that he had sent a short thank-you note.
The heavily laden marines filed up from the cavernous recesses of the Yorktown, moving antlike along the flight deck and disappearing into the bellies of the Super Stallions, whose giant rotors threw circles of dazzling, transparent sunlight, signaling that each of the choppers’ titanium-forged blades had now joined one of the earsplitting concerts of war.
In Yorktown’s landing force operations center, deep within the O2 deck, Freeman, like Tibbet, loaded for bear, was going over their joint plan of attack. Like all good plans in life and in battle, it was simple in concept. Of course the devil, as always, was in the details. First, Yorktown’s Cobra gunships would ride shotgun on both the northern and southern flanks of Yorktown’s helo stream. Second, the Cobras, fed SATPIX intel, would soften up all of the rebel AA defenses, leaving Tibbet’s first wave of infantry to go in and gut the ABC complex. HUMINT assets believed the two two-story structures, connected at their midpoints by a two-story ferro cement walkway and surrounded by a virtually treeless one-square-mile perimeter, comprised the central cog in ABC’s operation. The complex was believed to be the place where the manufacture of terrorist weapons had made what the Pentagon’s practitioners of the “dismal science” of economics referred to as a “quantum leap in economies of scale.” All of which was pretentious Pentagon jargon for the fact that terrorist weapons manufactured in the ABC complex had shifted from the garages of the Middle East to high-efficiency American-style assembly lines.
Moscow, Freeman understood, had still not given official permission for the American helos to enter Russian airspace, it being accepted by Washington that on advice from the United Nations there would be an outraged denunciation of the U.S. choppers’ presence, led by the Russian delegate Petrov and supported by the French. This was also accepted by the White House as necessary to make the Russian president look tough even while it offered him a chance to be rid of the rebel ABC without having to commit regular Russian troops to fight Russians. What the Russian president had not clarified, however, was whether American fighters or bombers would be permitted to enter Russian airspace. But he had reiterated to Washington that he would be able to restrain regular Russian air force and naval units from becoming embroiled with the MEU for only a maximum of twenty-four hours. Douglas Freeman assured Colonel Tibbet and Yorktown’s Crowley that as titular head of the MEU’s operation, he would take full responsibility for releasing Yorktown’s Harriers and McCain’s Joint Strike Fighters against the ABC complex at Lake Khanka should a Russian air attack threaten American lives.
“Fleet won’t go for this,” Yorktown’s Captain Crowley warned Freeman and Tibbet.
Freeman’s jaws tightened. “Let’s get one thing straight, gentlemen. I’ve been personally tapped by the president of the United States to be the senior-ranking officer to command the operation. As such, it’s not my intention to go running around the damn fleet getting permission slips so I can leave the room and go to the toilet. Is that understood?”
Tibbet was noncommittal. The Yorktown’s skipper, however, was not so sanguine about Freeman’s willingness to act independently of him as admiral of the fleet.
“General,” the Yorktown skipper informed him, “a quick, enciphered e-mail to the White House could clear this up.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Freeman replied, “by the time they fart around in that situation room down in that Washington basement — hell, I mean half of those jokers down there don’t know where Baltimore is, let alone this damned lake — it’ll be hours before we get the green light. That time lost could cost us marine lives — a lot of lives. And now that our chief source of real-time intel, CNN, has blabbed it all over that we’re about to go in after this ABC complex, the enemy’ll be dug in even more than usual, securing their defensive perimeter like there’s no tomorrow. And let’s hope there’s no goddamned armor about,” Freeman added. “I say let’s quit pig-frigging around with e-mails to the White House. Release your Harriers upon request by either the colonel or me. I told you I’ll take the rap.”
“You can afford to,” retorted Crowley, “you’re retired.” He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Tibbet was watching the general and he saw Freeman’s face redden in controlled anger.
“Retired or not,” retorted Freeman, “I have the little matter of my reputation at stake. You gentlemen know how it goes. In our business you’re as good as your last op. Like a damn movie star: one big flop and you’re in the doghouse. Priest Lake’s my doghouse, and I want out. Badly. But I’m not going into this just because I want to save my ass or get my picture on the cover of Time. I’m doing this for those poor bastards, law-abiding Americans, who were just sitting there working one moment and were blown to smithereens the next by those scumbags.”
Tibbet had no difficulty in imagining fire coming from the general’s nostrils. “Anyway,” the general continued, “if our helos don’t take at least one round from Russian ground defenses, I’ll eat my hat. And if they do, that’ll justify release of the Harriers.”
Crowley hoped the Russians wouldn’t violate the twenty-four-hour agreement with Washington, but if they did, the fighter-bombers would certainly come in handy.
“Admiral?” It was his duty officer. A few minutes later Crowley informed Freeman, “My D.O. tells me there’s been a leak. We’re being inundated with e-mail requests about Bird Rescue. Some correspondents, including a gal from Newsweek, are saying the name the Pentagon gave to this mission is a cynical ploy to win over the environmentalist lobby in support of yet another unilateral U.S. invasion. Would you comment?”
“Invasion!” Freeman said angrily. “This is an operation to chase down a bunch of goddamn murderers. You can tell them from me that—”
“Wait a second, General,” said Crowley, who instructed one of his computer operators to take down Freeman’s comment verbatim.
“Tell them,” said Freeman, “that the list of endangered species on Lake Khanka is as long as your goddamned arm. The one to give to the media is the Grus japonensus. Half those liberal bastards might even be able to spell it. It’s a very rare, endangered species of red-crowned crane, and there’s a critter called the sheathfish endemic to the region.” Freeman turned to Colonel Tibbet. “I like giving the bastards that one, Jack. Just watch and wait for one of the TV anchors to keep a straight face with ‘sheath.’”
“Ah,” Crowley told the computer operator, “I suggest you clean that up a little before you send it. Okay with you, Douglas?”
Colonel Tibbet grinned, welcoming a flash of levity to the occasion, and Freeman readily agreed. There was no point in deliberately riling them up. It reminded him of Marte Price and his deal with her to give her first crack at an exclusive in return for her having come clean about the government’s initial and futile attempt to keep the attack on DARPA ALPHA under wraps.
They could all hear the mounting thunder on the roof, and the appearance of Tibbet’s S-2, the marines’ intel chief, confirmed the MEU was ready to “rock’n’roll.”
“Look,” Freeman told Tibbet and Crowley. “If we can knock these bastards out at Khanka, it won’t be just them and the terrorists’ stockpile we’ll be taking out, gentlemen. It’ll be a lesson to any other ragtag damn terrorists that no matter what it takes, when you kill Americans, we’ll come after you — in your own damn country, if need be. So that Captain Crowley here might even release his Harriers.”
“I’ll put the Harriers on standby,” said Crowley. “That’s as far as I’ll go for now.”
Freeman shook his hand.
“Maybe,” cut in Tibbet, trying to help his old naval colleague Crowley stand his ground against Douglas Freeman’s well-intentioned but relentless charge, “you tried to reach Washington to get ‘weapons-free’ for the Harriers, but your encrypting program temporarily crashed?”
Freeman winked at Tibbet. “I like it!”
Crowley kept a straight face. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
John Cuso, the executive officer who had been seconded from McCain to Yorktown to assist Crowley, had seen his share of helo assaults launched from the ship, but it was always a new and exciting experience for him. From Vultures’ Row, high in the control island, Cuso looked down at the frantic, yet endlessly rehearsed, preparations for combat. He could see the fifteen Super Stallions and Tibbet and Freeman crouching low as each was hurried aboard his respective chopper, a lead Super Stallion for Freeman, his six-man SpecOp team, mortar squad, and other marines aboard, a command Huey for Tibbet. Cuso wondered how many would return. What had Hitler said? Making war was like grabbing a gun and walking into a pitch-black room — anything could happen.
Each of the fifteen Super Stallions in Yorktown’s thirty-two-helo force would be carrying fifty fully loaded marines, which meant putting 750 marines in the target zone in the first assault wave — providing there was no interference en route. Each of the big Stallions had three.50-caliber machine guns, one located in the forward starboard crew door and two on pivot mounts for open-ramp firing, all three weapons fed by linked-belt.50-caliber ammunition. As the air armada rose above a blue, choppy sea, two-thirds of the total marine MEU combat force was en route toward the rugged coast of Russia’s far east, which was already in sight as a dark squiggle on the horizon.
Aboard his Huey, Colonel Tibbet was double-checking the landing area selected from the SATPIX where two Super Stallions were to deposit their sling-carried fifteen-thousand-pound bladders of aviation fuel for both helos and Harriers, should it become necessary to call for the Harriers to provide close air support and enough loiter time over the target. During the vital refueling, squads of marines would rush to form a defensive perimeter screen, though it was not anticipated that much ground fire at all would be encountered, given the absence of troops on SIGINT and SATPIX intel.
Though clouds appeared to be thickening and were clustering ominously along the coast, forming a line of ragged gray ahead of them, the rising of the thirty-two-aircraft armada made an impressive sight. An able force, if ever he’d seen one, thought Tibbet, whose high morale had been duly noted by Peter Norton who, in an attempt to contain his rising fear before the mission, had closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the happiest, most relaxing times of his youth — picnicking and swimming in the James River to beat the awful, humid heat of August.
As the low-flying MEU approached the coast, a Russian fisherman-cum-coastwatcher, Alexander Rostovich, whose great grandfather had been killed as an adviser to Ho Chi Minh’s legions against the Americans in Vietnam, was awakened to the choppers’ sound. Grabbing his binoculars, he glimpsed a white U.S. star with a white bar either side of it on one of the incoming helos of the U.S. air armada. Racing into his fishing hut, where he kept an old but reliable 8 mm Mauser that was always loaded for the sharks that bothered his nets when he was fishing off Timpevay Bay or for bears that could wipe out a year’s carefully tended vegetable patch in a few seconds, Rostovich raised the weapon and let fly a round at the armada, pulled back the bolt, swearing as he did so, rammed another round home, and fired again. By sheer dumb luck, this round hit the cockpit of a Stallion, spiderwebbing the copilot’s window screen and narrowly missing his head.
“Ground fire!” the copilot reported. “Three o’clock, from that hut down by that garden. Anyone see it? Along the cliff edge.”
“I’ve got it, Stallion. He’s mine,” came a voice, the violation of radio silence no serious thing, given the number of helos that were airborne and clearly visible to isolated settlements along the coast. In addition, the ABC, thanks to CNN, Al Jazeera, and all the others, clearly knew that the strike was imminent. One of the SuperCobras, feared by and known to Saddam’s soldiers as the “Skinny Birds,” peeled off into a steep, 180 m.p.h. dive, the helo firing its three-barrel rotary chin-mounted chain gun, the one-in-five red tracers dancing crazily about the hut. The hut collapsed, as did Rostovich. There was no fire or explosion, nothing more than a cloud of dust rising above the imploded hut, the coastwatcher lying spread-eagled in a garden of collapsed trellises. Little chance he was still alive. In any event, the target had been “neutralized.” Even so, Jack Tibbet did a one-eighty and called for the six Harriers. There was no way he could know how much ground fire was about to open up, and, with Crowley’s blessing, decided that he’d rather be called overcautious than unnecessarily risk his marines on the coast before they reached the target.
“Blackbirds go!” ordered Crowley, and within minutes the Harriers, electing to make their short takeoff over the vertical lift to conserve fuel, were aloft, Freeman simultaneously requesting McCain’s vertical takeoff Joint Strike Fighters to assist in suppression of hostile ground fire, “should it become necessary,” the latter phrase a qualifier indicating that the American aircraft would not fire unless fired upon, a political fiction that might qualify as an acceptable order in the Byzantine business of the military’s post-op inquiries. All that was known in the fleet was that a Super Stallion had taken a hit, and “no,” the copilot rudely informed Tibbet’s G-2, “it was not a fucking bird. It was a fucking round, a fucking 7.62 mm rolling around in the damn cabin.” For all anyone, including Freeman and Tibbet, whose lead helos had already passed well beyond the fisherman’s hut, knew, the entire helo armada might be coming under ground fire. All everyone had heard for certain was that radio silence had been broken because a Super Stallion had come under ground fire. The Stallion had taken a “direct hit.” Soon the rumor amongst the fully laden combat troops, wedged uncomfortably between their web-seats and the fuselage, was that a Stallion had gone down.
“Anyone get out?”
“Don’t know.”
“Shit!”
In Aussie Lewis’s wry assessment, the usual fuckups had begun.
“Where are those friggin’ Blackbirds?” asked the Stallion’s copilot, who had narrowly missed being killed.
“On the way,” his pilot told him. Relax.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Relax, Evers,” repeated the pilot more sternly. “I know this is your first hot mission, but we’ve a ways to go. Freeman and Tibbet know what they’re doing.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I know it’s hard, Dave, but you’ve been trained by the best. You’ll be fine.”
But there was trouble aboard the Stallion. It was coming from a hoarse-voiced general, Douglas Freeman, who, by sheer accident during a chat with a mortar crewman, discovered that the marine, indeed the entire mortar crew and one of its M40A1-marine-trained snipers aboard the Stallion, had by some oversight been through marine Colonel Cobb Martens’ weapons training battalion — made famous by Colonel Michael Nance — without having been given an AK-47 or AK-74 familiarization course. Freeman told the pilot to radio Tibbet, who, red-faced, sent an encrypted fast-blast message to Yorktown to the effect that anyone waiting in the second wave who was not familiar with firing either the AK-47 or AK-74 must be so instructed. Immediately.
There was a problem. There were no AK-47s or AK-74s on the Yorktown. It was an American ship, for crying out loud.
“What?” was the general’s thunderous reply. He couldn’t believe that in the twelve vessels that constituted the Seventh Fleet there wasn’t a single AK-47 in any of the ship’s armories. It seemed particularly improbable, given the popularity of the virtually indestructible Russian weapon among British and American Special Ops teams like his.
“I know where there’re some,” Aussie Lewis assured him. “Unofficial, of course. They’ve got ’em stashed in McCain’s armory. There’s an ex-marine captain there with special arms training. He was wounded in Iraq. He’s now working in McCain’s Blue Tile. He’s, ah, what you might call a ‘collector.’”
“Is he?” said Freeman who, turning to Lieutenant Terry Chester, one of Jack Tibbet’s platoon commanders, ordered, “Message Yorktown that Colonel Tibbet and I expect every marine to know how to fire and strip an AK-47 before our Stallions return to pick them up. If we get into a logistics screwup and anyone runs short of ammo, an AK-47 snatched off a dead Russian might be the thing that turns the tide.”
On the Yorktown, the general’s “turn the tide” phrase was met with skepticism, but not, as one might have expected, by the veterans, who knew how an extra clip of ammo could save your hide. The skepticism came more from those young Leathernecks who hadn’t been in action before, whose number comprised about seven hundred of the MEU’s total sixteen hundred personnel. Some of them, such as young Peter Norton, who, though he had never met Freeman, knew something of him, understood that he was fanatical about logistical details, one of his ruling adages being “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.” And had they known Freeman, skeptics would also have known that Douglas Freeman’s attention to logistical detail had been justified by every hostile engagement he’d been part of.
“How far to target?” Aussie asked the Stallion’s burly crew chief.
“A hundred and forty-seven miles,” said the chief.
“That by road?” Aussie asked, leaning forward expectantly, elbows pressing down hard on his pack. Sal and Gomez were watching intently.
“As the crow flies,” answered the crew chief.
“Well,” said Aussie, “I’m not a fucking crow!” and sat back, visibly more relaxed. So were the other team members. It was a curious “good luck” ritual for Aussie, normally the least superstitious of men. At some point at the beginning of a mission he would always ask the crew chief, “How far to target?” and hold his breath. If the reply was so many miles or clicks, Aussie would ask, “That by road?” and the reply, common enough in the airborne services, was usually “As the crow flies.” As long as the crew chief’s answer had “crow” in it, it was a sign to Aussie that the mission would be successful.
“Ya hear that, boys?” he shouted at his team. “As the fucking crow flies.”
“What? — ” said Sal absently, checking his weapon. “Oh yeah, crow — right.”
“Gonna be a piece o’ cake!” said Aussie.
“No problem,” said Freeman, who was keen to maintain high morale, but he and Tibbet had pored over the logistics of “the devil’s domain” and knew the crucial element on this mission was not surprise — that had been lost because of CNN — but rapid resupply. Otherwise, as the general and colonel concurred, it could be a monumental balls-up, the general’s second Priest Lake.
What the general hadn’t told Aussie or the team — had never told them — was that he made it his business before every mission to give the crew chief aboard their helo or landing craft a heads-up about Aussie’s “crow.” In a team where there were few, if any, secrets, this was an exception that the general had made.
No matter how close he and his men had become over the years, he believed that for each member there had to be a moat across which neither friend nor foe should venture, an inviolable port that was the private preserve of secrets which only men and their Maker knew, the terrible memories of comrades lost, like Bone Brady, the fatally wounded SpecOp soldier whom, years before, Douglas Freeman had shot at point-blank range. It was the man’s face, head flung back, eyes rolling comically and all the more grotesquely for that, bloodied teeth, bottom jaw sliding from side to side, that haunted the general. No matter that Brady had begged to be put out of his misery, the face would rise up in the gut-tightening minutes before deployment.
For a moment, Douglas Freeman’s head slumped in shame, but he sat up quickly, ramrod straight, and made as if to clear his eye of grit, always a problem with so many men and things aboard, packed tightly together. “Know that fella Orwell?” he shouted at Johnny Lee. “Limey who wrote that Animal Farm?”
“Read it in school,” said Johnny, straining for his naturally high-pitched voice to rise above the roar of the helo’s three big turboshafts.
“Yeah,” said Freeman, pushing Bone Brady’s face out of range, turning his attention to maintaining morale. “Well, Orwell said that he sometimes thought life was a constant battle against dirt.” Freeman wiped his eye with his sleeve, hoping that their brownish green camouflage uniforms wouldn’t stand out too starkly against the ice. In frozen marshland the camouflage would be perfect, but not against the white sheet of a frozen lake. “Aussie!” he called out.
“Sir!” shouted Aussie obediently, like a good marine, that is, more formally than he would have had only the team members been present.
“Joke,” ordered the general.
They hit an air pocket.
“Choir barfing?” asked Aussie.
“Not yet,” said Salvini. “Is that the joke?”
There was laughter now in the dark, stuffy, dimly lit interior.
Choir smiled and doffed his Fritz to Aussie as if his horse had just won the Triple Crown. “Do,” said Choir, raising his voice, imitating an upper-class snob, “tell us your amusement.”
“My amusement?” said Aussie, head back in mock surprise. “Screwing.”
“Screwing what?” shouted a marine, name tag “Picard.”
“Anything that moves!” shouted Salvini.
“Birds,” said Aussie, feigning indignation, using the Australian slang for young women. “Nice-looking birds.”
“How ’bout one of those protected—” began a marine, name tag “Jackson, K.,” who was nursing a squad automatic weapon, “—What d’you call those birds?”
“Cranes,” said Marine Picard. “Yeah, would you screw a crane, Aussie?”
“He’d have to stand very still,” Aussie answered. “I wouldn’t chase the bugger!”
Catcalls and raucous laughter broke out so noisily that they momentarily drowned out the “whoomp whoomp” of the Stallion.
“Fussy,” said Choir, now adopting a cockney accent that made his pronunciation sound like “pussy.”
Aussie was suddenly alert. “Pussy? Where?”
The entire marine platoon was laughing and chortling at the silly banter, Marine Jackson, who’d initiated the exchange with Aussie, now being referred to as “Pussy,” a name that he knew as a marine would stick to him as long as he was in the corps — or dead.
“Joke!” another marine insisted. “That Aussie isn’t quitting on us, is he?”
“No way!” replied Aussie.
“Keep it clean,” said Freeman. “Women aboard.”
Aussie’s head shot up. “Where? Show me where!”
A lone hand was raised. She was an African American, Melissa Thomas, Tibbet’s MEU’s first woman combatant.
“No problem,” said Aussie. “It’s as clean as a whistle.”
“Stand up!” someone ordered Aussie.
“For the lady, sure,” said Aussie. “I don’t mind—”
“No,” shouted a SAW gunner. “So we can fuckin’ shoot you if it isn’t funny.” That got a big laugh, one of the loudest coming from the general who, as much as any of them, probably wouldn’t have laughed at this nonsense during stand-down time but whose unspoken anxiety about going into combat would lead him to grasp on to anything that would offer temporary relief.
“Well,” said Aussie, “this young married couple, both marines—”
“Hey!” shouted someone. “No same-sex marriage in the corps bullshit. Right, Thomas?”
“Right!” Melissa shouted.
“Let him finish,” said a gunny, one of those sergeants who ran the corps.
“Right,” said Aussie, raising his voice to a near shout. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah, get on with it!”
“So,” began Aussie, “this couple are arguin’ about who should get up to make coffee every morning, and the guy says to his wife, ‘I think you should be the one to brew the coffee. You’re the woman of the house,’ and she says, ‘Don’t give me that crap. We’re both working, so I don’t see why you can’t get up and brew the coffee.’ So this argument goes on about who should brew the friggin’ coffee an’ she sees it’s going nowhere so she says, ‘Will you take scriptural authority on this?’ The guy says, ‘Scriptural? — You mean the Bible?’ She says, ‘Yeah.’ He thinks for a mo, then says, ‘Okay. Bring it out.’ And there it was in the New Testament: ‘He-brews.’”
There was a concerted groan within the Super Stallion. “Shoot ’im!” someone shouted, but still they liked it. The joke had done just what Freeman had wanted it to do, channeling the precombat jitters, especially amongst those, such as Melissa Thomas, who Tibbet had told Freeman had been too young for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and for whom “Operation Bird Rescue” was their first real mission.
“That,” the general told Aussie, “is the corniest damn joke I’ve ever heard.”
“I like it!” shouted Choir.
“Yeah, you would,” said Aussie, “you Bible-thumping Welsh turd.”
“Thank you,” riposted Choir, “very much.”
Freeman was grinning, but Melissa Thomas, sitting at the rear of the starboard row of canvas-webbed seats by the Stallion’s door, wasn’t. She envied the ease with which each member of Freeman’s six-man SpecWar team enjoyed one another’s humor. She still couldn’t get that kind of response from her rifle squad, no matter that ever since she’d responded to the commercial on TV that showed marines fast-roping down from a haze-gray helicopter, freeze-framed as they raced into action from the helo, she’d done all that was required of her. “Can you do it?” the commercial’s narrator had challenged. “If you can, you’re one of the best.”
Her brother Danny “dissed” the ad as elitist, and that’s precisely what appealed to her — that and the stirring background rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever!” It was an old story: the military as the African American’s way out of the ghetto. If you couldn’t dribble and sink a basketball in her Detroit ghetto or get a scholarship to college, your horizons were very limited. The Marine Corps, after a dogged battle against Congress, had finally been forced to yield, and women were in. But that was only half the battle. Female marines had not been allowed in ground combat units. Being assigned to Operation Bird Rescue meant that Melissa Thomas was the first female marine in history to be purposely put in harm’s way rather than in a supportive capacity aboard ship. Melissa had learned much, particularly about self-reliance, the corps having the lowest officer-to-personnel ratio in any of the United States Armed Forces, and she said a prayer asking God to help her to be strong, conscious of the fact that she was a trailblazer, not only as an African American but as the first female marine to be in combat on the ground. She thought of the bus journey to Parris Island along the lonely, two-lane elevated road over the swamps and the ebb and flow of the salt marshes of South Carolina’s Port Royal Sound, recalling the moment when she’d first come to stand in the painted yellow footprints in front of the receiving shed, knowing that there were drill instructors who wanted her to fail.
Ever since she was a young girl in Detroit she had always wanted to be part of a shipboard marine contingent, her uncle explaining how a marine’s original role in the English navy was to go aloft, high into the rigging, so as to snipe the enemy and to enforce the captain’s discipline on their own ship. With images of raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima dancing in her head during the hard, unforgiving physical and mental conditioning of Parris now behind her, she had become the first ever female marine combatant to be assigned to an amphibious unit aboard the floating military airbase called Yorktown. But with few exceptions, Melissa had been only grudgingly accepted by her fellow marines, an outsider informally assigned to little more than “swab deck” status aboard Yorktown, no matter that she had qualified in everything they threw at her. She’d run the marine gauntlet from the recruits’ “fright night” in her “Forming Phase” to Phase I’s backbreaking, sinew-sapping PT to Phase II’s mastery of the M16A2 5.56 mm combat rifle to North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune as the first female recruit ever to attend the School of Infantry, hitherto the sole preserve of male recruits. And finally, there was graduation day when her DI presented her with the coveted eagle-topped globe and anchor emblem of the United State Marine Corps, and for Melissa the special moment when she introduced her dad, now frail with age and eyes brimming with tears of pride, to DI Morgana Schmidt. Schmidt, a black belt — level martial arts drill instructor of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion, had overseen recruit Thomas and the other 69 recruits in the platoon all the way from Pick-Up briefing to graduation, carefully, at times roughly, guiding Melissa through the morphing of yet another civilian into a United States Marine.
As the Super Stallion hit a series of sharp wind shears, she felt a wave of nausea pass through her, something she had not felt since experiencing what her DI had introduced as a “visit to the pool,” a gross understatement, if Melissa had ever heard one, of the terrifying requirement of each marine to float in full battle dress and boots in the dreaded water-training facility.
Even now, the memory of impending drowning and the palpable dread one experienced on approaching the hated drop boards over the water which she, like any other recruit, had to master, still haunted her dreams, and now, as the Stallion continued to buck, she prayed to God, as she had prayed with the Yorktown’s padre, that she would not find herself in deep water in combat.
As they approached the gray, socked-in coastline of Russia’s wild and lonely far eastern coast, turbulence struck the Super Stallions.
“Need a bag?” Sal asked Choir.
“How ’bout a bucket?” proffered Aussie.
Choir’s expression segued from mild anxiety into a broad smile. “I’m feeling great.”
The Stallion dropped again, the G-force lifting many of the marines off the web-seats to clearly voiced expressions of disapproval from the men and Melissa who, on this helo alone, formed a third of the MEU’s Bravo rifle company which, in turn, constituted one of the three rifle companies of what would be the MEU’s battalion landing team.
Freeman saw the alarm on Melissa’s face, but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared, marine discipline arresting any potential show of alarm. For her to have complained or even sworn would have immediately been seen as a typical “skirt” reaction. The parent in Freeman wanted to reassure her that the turbulence would probably subside as soon as they passed over the coastal mountains between Glazkovka and Cape Titova on the air route that he and Tibbet had selected through the valleys between the Kiyevka and Ussuri rivers. But the officer in him told him not to single her out; it would only reinforce her marginalization, which he’d sensed, albeit subtly, during liftoff from Yorktown. Still—
“Well,” announced the Stallion’s crew chief, “we’re well past Cape Titova!” Hoots and laughter followed.
“Bring it on!” yelled someone.
Freeman saw Melissa Thomas smile, trying to be one of the boys, and he empathized with her sense of being an outsider — everyone had such moments — and thought about how he might help her to feel included in the team. He asked a marine in the mortar squad, a loader, about Thomas’s classification.
“She’s an E-2, S/S, sir.”
“Ah,” said Freeman, the designation telling him she was a private first class with sniping credentials. Impressive.
“Yes, sir,” continued the loader. “She’s a good shot.”
A “good shot” was an understatement. S/S told the general that this marine with the shy, dark eyes had been tough enough to have graduated from Parris with not only a high score in marksmanship but also the designation “Scout/Sniper.” It was an outstanding achievement, but for a woman in a man’s world, it was yet another way of moving herself, albeit unwittingly, further from her fellow marines. The rifle with the big scope told Freeman that Melissa must have been able to repeatedly hit a man-sized target in the head at ranges greater than half a mile. You didn’t have to be a giant to do that occasionally, but to do it consistently meant you had to be strong and have iron nerves. “Nerves of iron,” Freeman used to tell his recruits, “not nerves of steel, because steel springs back at you. No, you need iron will to lie there for hours in your hide, not moving so much as a hair. Waiting, controlling your bladder sphincter through sheer will. You might have the luxury of a scope spotter to share the mission with you, or you might be alone.” It was Douglas Freeman’s intention, as had always been his inclination, to make the outsider feel at home.
A collective groan greeted another sudden gut-plummeting drop in an air pocket, Aussie catching a glimpse out of one of the Super Stallion’s starboard windows of a white squiggle of river which he guessed must be the Kiyevka, and farther west, ragged fragments of mountain mist above woods that in parts obliterated the sliver of another river cutting through forests as thick and dark as anything he’d seen on the other side of the world at Priest Lake.
The general too had seen the black forests and detected a heightened tone of urgency rushing back from the Stallion’s cockpit into the forty or so pack-laden marines of Bravo rifle company. For a millisecond Eddie Mervyn and interpreter Johnny Lee saw what looked like a marine Harrier diving through the gray stratus, and detected an acrid smell invading the cabin.
“Hold tight!” yelled the crew chief. “Evasive action.”
“Another fucking fisherman?” said Aussie.
“More than one,” said the crew chief unsmilingly.
The Stallion was bucking and yawing violently amid a black, pock-scarred sky, the pilot battling the yoke, fighting to evade the AA fire.
“Oh, shit!” said a marine, one of the few who had a clear view through one of the square windows over the helo’s stubby portside wing. A loud ripping noise cut through the vibrating roar of the Stallion’s three engines and the deep thumping of its rotors as the helo’s gunners opened up, hot shell casings momentarily glinting golden in a sudden sunbeam that quickly disappeared into the stratus. The Stallion was on instrument flying, the copilot thanking God for the upgrade that had finally given the CH-53Es the forward-looking infrared and radar.
“Eight o’clock! Eight o’clock! AA!” The ramp’s right-side rear gunner was shouting to alert his ramp and crew-door colleagues. Aussie was able to glimpse only part of the helo’s two arcs of red tracer that were streaming earthward as they sought to silence the two anti-aircraft batteries manned by gunners who from this height looked no bigger than toys.
“More at six!” bellowed Eddie Mervyn.
“I see ’em!” acknowledged the crew-door gunner. This was followed by long, concerted bursts from the Stallion’s gunners, the interior of the “fuse,” the Stallion’s long troop cabin, filling with cough-inducing cordite fumes together with the smell of perspiring bodies, the heat having been turned way up to counteract the freezing rush of the slipstream through the open ramp and front crew door. Aussie saw Freeman talking animatedly on the radio phone and then caught sight of the Harrier, its 25 mm GAU cannon obliquely spitting devastating white fire into both AA batteries, knocking them out.
Several marines were being sick without time to grab the thick, brown paper “lunch bags” issued earlier by the crew chief. Over the noise of machine-gun fire, the rotors’ whoomp whoomp, and engines roaring, there was now a series of almost inaudible, soft, popping noises as the Stallion released its flares in hopes of drawing any anti-aircraft missiles to them rather than to the helo. Upon entering Russian airspace, everyone with the Bird Rescue armada had been worrying about SAMs, the big Russian surface-to-air missiles that had taken such a heavy toll of the B-52s and other American aircraft in ’Nam. Freeman, however, with the Priest Lake catastrophe fresh in mind, was more worried about the smaller, deadly Igla and other shoulder-fired MANPADs at this relatively low altitude. Iglas had a range of more than two miles. He was praying that the AA gunfire was all the flak that would come the helos’ way. The general checked the Super Stallion’s airspeed indicator: 167 m.p.h. With the Stallion’s engines on maximum power, they should be over the site soon, unless more AA batteries were waiting in ambush down the valley.
A marine lurched forward, his insides blown across the aisle. There was a tremendous flapping noise as ragged aluminum edging from the fist-sized hole that had been shot out of the Stallion’s starboard side trembled violently like a flag in a stiff gale. There was panic, half a dozen marines covered in entrails and blood, one of the most disgusting sights Freeman and his team had ever seen. The crew chief, though, had witnessed it before, and with astonishing agility, given the crazy gyrations of the Stallion as its pilots fought to regain control after the impact, he had produced two large khaki plastic bags, which he dumped at the feet of those covered in the blood and entrails which, moments before, had been their buddy, Private First Class James Cartwright.
“This bag,” yelled the crew chief, opening one, “has clean rags in it. The other is for the dirty rags. Got it?”
One marine, his face splattered with his dead comrade’s blood and other unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone, couldn’t respond, his eyes frozen, his body rigid with fear. The crew chief shook him hard by the shoulder, the chief’s canvas glove immediately soaking up blood. “Hey!” shouted the chief, his right hand grabbing the marine’s chin. “You hear me, Marine?” He said it with a DI’s command voice, an undisguised call to duty, a tone born and bred daily by the corps, in the corps, for the corps. The marine answered the crew chief by assuring him that he was okay.
Freeman glimpsed a marine beside him. It was Melissa Thomas, down on her knees by the dead marine, placing a red gelatinous lump of something she picked up into the dump bag. The AA fire was already past, but no one noticed for several seconds. Freeman’s team had seen dead and dying from Southeast Asia to Iraq, but several of the marines were traumatized by the sight of one of their comrades with his entrails blasted out of him. Aussie assured the traumatized marine, “You’ll be right, mate. Hang on.” Unable to find his “lunch bag” in time, the marine was throwing up violently into his helmet. He fumbled for his canteen.
“Nah,” said Aussie, giving the marine his own sick bag and taking the man’s helmet from him. Aussie turned to the crew chief. “Got some extra water, Chief?”
“Right with you,” said the chief, and went back to his seat under which he had a four-gallon plastic drum of distilled water, which he passed to Aussie. The SpecFor man dumped the helmet’s contents into the big plastic “out” bag. The cloying stench of sick mixing with the smell of aviation exhaust was enough to make several others feel ill, including Johnny Lee and Choir. Aussie washed out the sick marine’s helmet, and gave it back to him. His name patch read “R. Kegg.”
“Listen,” Aussie lied to the grateful young marine, who looked no older than sixteen, “combat’ll be easier than this.”
The marine nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
“Anytime, mate.” Aussie could see, however, that the young marine was abnormally strung out with anxiety. “Listen, press your tongue hard up against your palate. It forces you to breathe deeply. You’ll relax.” Aussie paused. “They teach you that at Parris?”
“I wasn’t at Parris, sir,” the youngster said, almost apologetically.
“Oh,” said Aussie. “So you must live west of the ole Mississippi. “You were trained at Point Loma then?”
“Yes, sir. I’m a — I’m a ‘Hollywood Marine.’” He tried to smile.
“So, did they teach you that trick?”
“What — oh, about pressing—”
“Yeah, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, what the fuck did they teach you?” said Aussie, smiling. He turned to Melissa Thomas, who was helping to clean up the mess. “Did you learn that at Parris?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered, embarrassed by the sudden attention.
“Not sure? Hey!” Aussie yelled so loudly he startled young Kegg. “You marines! Listen up. A tip from Uncle Lewis. On long op flights, or short ones, in any sticky situation, you press your tongue hard up against your palate. You will get more oxygen. It helps, believe me!”
“Who are you?” demanded a marine.
“Grandstander!” offered another.
Aussie ignored them and winked at Melissa, who was helping him and who, unlike some of the others, understood that Aussie Lewis was only trying to boost morale, distracting them from the horror that had been visited upon them by the anti-aircraft fire.
“You’ve seen this stuff before,” Aussie told Melissa.
“I was a nurse’s helper in an ER for a while,” she replied. “Before I joined the corps.”
“Good for you, marine,” said Aussie.
Melissa returned the smile which, given the bloody circumstances aboard the Super Stallion, struck some of the marines as disrespectful at best, at worst, obscene, in the presence of the dead marine. But Melissa couldn’t help her response to Aussie; it was the first time since Parris that a man, and a renowned SpecWar warrior at that, had said something so warmly to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“He made a pass at you?” taunted one sullen marine as Melissa returned to her seat at the rear of the helo and buckled up.
“No,” she replied. “He said something nice to me.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Hey, Thomas,” asked a marine who was nursing a SAW. “This Aussie. Isn’t he the guy who coldcocked that A-rab fanatic?”
“All A-rabs are fanatics,” proffered a mortar squad loader.
“Bullshit!” said another marine.
“Whatever he used,” said the SAW marine, “that’s him. Right? That’s Aussie Lewis?”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “That’s him.”
“My old man told me ’bout that convoy,” put in another marine. “The A-rab was belted and was using a baby as cover, tryin’ to blow up the whole fuckin’ convoy when Thomas’s boyfriend here wasted the fucker. So, technically, he didn’t coldcock him. He used a shotgun.”
“Horseshit!” argued another. “The Aussie took him out with a piece.”
“I heard the crazy bomber was a woman,” said the mortar loader.
“Whatever he used,” repeated the SAW marine, “that’s him. That’s Aussie Lewis.”
“What happened to the baby?” another marine inquired.
“Who knows?”
“Probably died,” concluded the loader. “Either that or he’s a martyr by now, ready for all those virgins.”
Melissa saw something move up forward in the semidarkness and instinctively gripped her rifle. It was the crew chief checking his watch against the speed indicator, his sudden movement unnerving her, everyone on edge. “Twenty minutes to amber,” the chief announced.
“Twenty minutes?” growled one of the SAW gunners. “Feels like we’ve been up here twenty hours.”
Choir Williams was looking pale again. The fact that he had never complained about his motion sickness was one of the things Freeman admired most about the warrior.
The general moved down the lines, chatting with the marines. It was hard physical work talking against the racket of the three engines, the rotors, and the bone-juddering vibrations that followed the AA fire. But he kept at it, exuding confidence and strength, talking casually to the troops about anything, surprising them with his grasp of detail, as when he passed Melissa Thomas, explaining to her how the end of the Cold War had spawned two Russias: On the one hand there was the affluent, technically savvy Russia, and on the other, the outmoded but still politically powerful Communist Russia. They were in fierce opposition, jockeying for who would rule in the twenty-first century. “The Russians, like us,” he pointed out, “like any sensible army, don’t go into a fight advertising who their officers are. Hell, their Spetsnaz — SpecWar troops — don’t wear any insignia at all. But you can tell who’s in charge.” The general looked at Melissa and her squad. “Anyone know how?”
“Because,” said a loader, “they’re the ones yelling at everybody.”
Freeman laughed easily. “Maybe, but the surest sign is that they’re the best dressed. Lot of them are still like the British officers in past wars. If they can afford it, they have their combat fatigues as well as full-dress uniforms made on Nevsky Prospect.”
“Where’s that, sir?”
“St. Petersburg,” said Freeman, glancing at the airspeed indicator. The Super Stallions were capable of around 170 m.p.h. but with a load of fifty marines and because fragments of the AA hit had bled off some hydraulic lines, they were down to 141 m.p.h. Even so, the warning amber light would be coming on soon. Someone asked Freeman how it was that the terrorist H-block had been missed by satellite surveillance for so long.
“It’s cold,” Melissa Thomas ventured. “Wouldn’t show up on the infrared?”
“No,” said Freeman. “Buffalo’s cold in winter too, but SATPIX’ll pick up any building in Buffalo because of all the heating vents. They show up beautifully on the IR cameras. So our best intel guess is that the terrorist tech wizards have designed a thermoslike roof shield so that the H-building shows up as a thermos, without giving us any idea of what’s inside.” The moment he said this, Douglas Freeman felt an ice-cold tremor run through him. What if the soil analyses, et cetera, were wrong, and the damn place was an empty shell, a trap? He was determined to keep the possibility to himself. His job now was to keep morale as high as possible. “So,” he told Melissa and every other marksman, which, given the marines’ standard, meant every man on the helo, “you should look for the bastards with the best-pressed battle fatigues and shoot them first. I hope you notice that I, on the other hand, am no better dressed than any of you. I’m indistinguishable from any of you, ’cept for my big mouth.” More laughter, more confidence-building after the bloody disaster that had just taken place aboard this, the marines’ second helo. Huey One, carrying Tibbet and his HQ communications group, was a half-mile ahead.
“Ten to amber!” came the crew chief’s voice. Freeman was wondering what had happened when the Harriers dove on the AA position. Had it been completely destroyed, its guns as well as its crew? Or would it be re-crewed and play havoc with the second wave? As so often happened, those in the middle of the action were the least able to discern exactly what was transpiring. He thought of Hitler again and the dark room. The Nazi Führer had been right about that.