“What’s up, sir?” Aussie asked the general, who didn’t hear him at first. The amber light came on. Ten minutes to green, and the air armada’s marines were gripping their weapons tightly, checking that their C-4 was safely packed, and doing deals with God. Senses were so strained that the stink of the scared soldiers, an oil drip from a leaking line, and vomit was overwhelming.
“General?” Aussie asked again.
“Damn fox,” said Freeman, his face tight with concern. “Killed on one of their mines. An SES intercept.”
Aussie’s brain was racing to keep up with Freeman, but sometimes that just wasn’t possible, given the breadth and depth of the general’s experience.
“A fox, wolf,” he told Aussie, “whatever, would never deliberately walk on a mine. They can smell anything that’s been handled by a human for months. Besides, carnivores’ve been hunted to damn near extinction, so they know better than to go anywhere near that H-block with all its odors. Which means it was well out on the perimeter.”
“Animal’d still smell it out there,” challenged Aussie.
“Yes,” conceded the general. “But there’s one thing, however, that’ll override human scent — any scent — so that even a fox with its nose to the ground’ll miss it.”
“Snow!” said Choir.
“Ten minutes to green!” shouted the crew chief.
“Snow!” said Freeman in disgust. “And we’re in NATO khaki green.”
“Shit!” said Aussie. “Must’ve fallen this morning.”
“And still falling,” said Freeman. “I’m going up to see the pilot. Bad enough we should have to try landing in snow, let alone sticking out like a whore’s tit once we deplane. Might as well paint targets on our ass.” He jabbed a finger at the laptop. “Our LZ is by a wood near this marshland. We could find cover in these woods outside the H-block perimeter.”
“Five minutes to green!” warned the crew chief. “Lock it up!” It was a new order occasioned by upgraded lock-in pins that secured the webbed shoulder and waist harnesses in the event of a hard landing.
“Maybe no snow’s fallen on the LZ,” said Aussie hopefully. “I mean maybe that was just a sick old fox. Couldn’t smell worth a damn, even though there was no snow to cover the mine?”
“Too many maybes,” said Freeman, but as he glanced down at the vastness of eastern Siberia he couldn’t see any snow, only the sheen of the lake. It was enormous. The marines heard a gut-punching thud as the hydraulics began alternately bleeding and gorging with fluid that would fully extend the helo’s huge rear ramp door. An enormous Russian sky stretched before them, but it came to an end farther west in what the SES had warned was a “significantly bruised line of L-3s,” thunderheads, stretching north to south like malevolent ships of the line. The Stallion, flying at 150 m.p.h. with a tailwind, was soon out of the mountainous and hilly country east of the lake, which they could see was completely frozen. Then they were descending over flatter, lower ground ten miles west of the lake, the land here a mere sixty-five yards above sea level, frozen but still no snow. Aussie could be right, the fox having detonated the mine not because snow had smothered the scent of it but because, quite simply, foxes, like humans, Aussie pointed out, aren’t always at the top of their game.
“Fact remains,” Freeman told Aussie, “I should have insisted on arctic white coveralls just in case.” He signaled the crew chief and asked him to check with the pilot for any sign on radar of snow clouds. The answer was that he couldn’t be sure but the line of L-3s was moving east toward them. Freeman turned his attention back to the dots — too slow for fighters, slow enough for helos — and a concomitant mass of smaller dots, as if a mass of iridescent pepper had been shaken on the screen.
“What do you think?” Freeman pressed the pilot. “Helos dropping chaff?” By “chaff” he meant strips of aluminum foil that would confuse enemy radar. In this case it would be impossible for the helos of the approaching MEU to get an accurate idea of the helo force approaching.
“That’s my guess, General,” the copilot said while feeding the larger dots on the radar screen into the computer’s memory to see whether there was a match between the radar signatures of the large dots and the known radar signatures of enemy aircraft types. The monitor’s orange-striped matchup bar was flashing the accompanying text: “Hind Mi-24,” a kind of attack helo.
“Bandit. Six miles and one o’clock.” In the Stallion’s cabin the red light was pulsing.
“Three minutes,” announced the chief. “Eight miles.” And Freeman knew that if the first wave faltered, failing either to keep the defenders inside the H-block’s perimeter or destroying the H-block itself, Moscow might summon the troops believed to be based in Kamen Rybolov, nine miles south of the ABC complex, to join the rebels. For a split second, Freeman recalled Patton telling the troops of Third Army that “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” and Freeman’s 2IC, Robert Norton, saying that Russians liked to win just as much as Americans.
“It’s not snowing, sir,” the chief informed him, “but it looks like one mother of a rainstorm up ahead, another arctic blast coming in over China’s Wanda Shan Mountains.”
“Good,” said Freeman, which surprised Melissa Thomas. “Rain we can use.”
“One minute.”
“Bandit. Two miles! Evasive action.”
The radio seemed to explode in multichannel chaos, the Stallion descending, Cobra gunships and Mi-24s mixing it up. “Watch him, watch him! Lock him up, lock him up! Good kill!”
The general rose, grabbing the PA mike, grumpily brushing the flexi-cord away from his face. Melissa remembered how Kegg had told her, “The old man’s a dead ringer for George C. Scott.” She didn’t know who George C. Scott could be, but the phrase “dead ringer” bothered her, and in the midst of the din all around, she had the strangest premonition, stronger than any she’d ever had, that while Douglas Freeman might win this battle and pass into legend, it would be his last, that though victorious, he would, like Admiral Lord Nelson, die at the moment of his greatest triumph. She immediately told herself it was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, but the stark image of him falling in this, his last battle, gripped her like no other premonition ever had.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled, the big Stallion rising higher and higher, popping flares, orange blossoms in a mad rain; then the Stallion descended once more.
“Marines!” Freeman shouted, to the accompaniment of rain drumming with such intensity against the Stallion that even the general had to shout in his command voice to be heard. “You’re marines. Half fish. Remember, weather is not neutral. Use this to your advantage. Use it!” The red light was steady, ten seconds till touchdown.
In the cockpit pilot and copilot were sweating profusely. What they’d assumed to be frozen ground or marshland below was obscured by a furious rush of hail that was hitting the Stallion’s rotors and fuselage like a mad sower throwing bullets instead of grain.
“Brace!” came the pilot’s warning.
A jolt, and the off-center touchdown was of such force that against all intent, weapons flew from the hands of several marines only milliseconds before the huge helo’s front wheels took the full weight of men and matériel, the noise of the big rotors in the downpour sounding like an enormous car wash. Freeman, his team, and the forty marines of Bravo Company’s First Platoon ran down the ramp, its zebra-painted edges a blur as they deployed into waist-high reeds and a cold rush of unfamiliar odors. From somewhere on their left flank, how far away it was difficult to tell, there came the deafening noise of other rotors scything through the downpour and the sounds of battle already under way. The rain had reduced visibility to zero, the urgent throbbing and roar of Cobra gunships and marine Harriers mixing it up overhead adding to the ceaseless crackling of small-arms fire and the distinctive swoosh of air-defense missiles, heard but unseen overhead, all combining with the frantic screeching of thousands upon thousands of birds and other wildlife, creating an ear-ringing cacophony and confusion that was enough to unnerve even the most hardened veteran.
Their Stallion was lifting off for the 170-mile return journey to patch, repair, refuel, and repack for a second wave of 750 marines from Tibbet’s battalion, waiting aboard Yorktown. All of which meant it would be an hour and a half at the earliest before any reinforcements might arrive for the men deplaning and unslinging the Hummers, mortars, and other weapons that were vital to any offensive against the ABC complex.
A tremendous, ear-punching boom was followed by a huge, roiling orange-black ball of flame rising several hundred feet above them through the rain. Two Cobra gunships had collided. Their burning debris fell slowly through the downpour, momentarily illuminating a small wood on their left flank. To his dismay, Freeman saw snowy ground and ice-encrusted marsh ahead, a mass of ice-sheathed reeds looming and fleetingly turning orange in the fire’s light, the reeds, some instantly dried by the heat, rattling furiously in the explosion’s aftermath.
Beyond the marsh they could see the gray of rain and nothing more, no H-block or any other structure. The most they could hope for in that moment was that the marines of Bravo Company’s second and third platoons and the assault force’s four Stallion-ferried anti-tank Hummers and six light fast-attack vehicles had been put down close by. A quick GPS check by platoon leader Lieutenant Terry Chester confirmed that the Super Stallion had delivered his marines and the general’s SpecOps team to within a quarter mile of the LZ’s center, a prodigious feat of flying, given the atrocious weather.
“Down!” shouted Freeman upon hearing the peculiarly rushing, shuffling noise of incoming, the Russian 122 mm round exploding in the woods in a yellow crash and sending white-hot fragments singing and ripping into a small stand of trees, shrapnel whizzing into and out of the wood.
“I’m hit!” cried a marine.
“Corpsman!” shouted the platoon sergeant, but the marine medic was already there. The young marine who’d been struck in the head by wood splinters was bleeding profusely. Stunned, he sat up and looked at his M-16 with a puzzled expression. The corpsman shouted at him to keep his hands away from his face. Thick smoke almost completely obliterated the marsh directly ahead, only about sixty yards away. It looked as if swamp gas was rising until its whiteness suggested a smoke-making round had landed there.
“Keep your eyes open,” Freeman ordered unnecessarily, as everyone was straining to see, anxious to link up with fellow marines from Bravo Company on either flank, and simultaneously fearing the danger of blue on blue, what correspondents, such as Marte Price and her ilk, would call friendly fire.
“BTR, two o’clock!” yelled Aussie Lewis, crouching down by the wood, pointing at the vehicle’s presence no more than a hundred yards away. One of the most brutish of the Soviet-designed troop transports, the Bronetransporter was a huge, eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, its two armor-lidded front eye slits, boatlike hull, sloping sides, and tortoiseshell-like top giving it the appearance of some lumbering, metallic reptile from another age. That, however, as Lieutenant Chester knew, was an illusion.
“Freeze!” he ordered. “Javelin only.”
The BTR, a type 60, Freeman thought, by the looks of it, would probably be carrying twelve troops inside, each soldier most likely armed with the new AKS-74U, a weapon that Freeman had chosen for himself. A shorter-barreled, folding-stock version of the AK-47, it was designed for easier use in the confined space that was the rear troop section. This meant the twelve Russian troops’ weapon would have a shorter range than most of the weaponry the marines carried. But he also knew the AK-74 had more whack per cartridge than most regular submachine guns.
By now, Freeman, like Chester, was wondering whether the Russians had spotted the platoon, both the general and Chester, in unconscious unison, training their binoculars on the enemy war wagon, Freeman quickly tapping the digital focus button for as sharp an image as possible through the curtain of rain. The BTR’s turret, with its heavy 14.5 mm and lighter coaxial 7.62 mm machine guns, was slewing left to right like a trap shooter unsure of which sector he should be watching.
“Amateurs,” Aussie told Freeman. “They don’t know where the hell they’re going. In panic mode — maybe here, maybe there.”
“Kegg?” called out Lieutenant Chester.
From long battle experience, Freeman’s vision, unlike that of Kegg and most of the marines, wasn’t held captive by the BTR. Instead he was scanning through a full 360 while taking care not to show himself above the reeds at the edge of the marsh that fringed this western sector of the vast lake. Mines were much less likely to be buried here because of the glutinous mud. He glimpsed a marine. It was Kegg, moving smartly forward with the Javelin anti-tank unit. But Freeman was more interested in looking beyond at the rising clouds of steamy vapor of the kind that he’d seen rising from the hot pools of New Zealand and Yellowstone. He could smell animal excrement, which struck him as odd, given that the ground was frozen. Perhaps he had stepped in a fresh pile of it.
Adjusting his throat mike and popping the digital earpiece from the matchbox-sized collar unit into his ear, the general made contact with Lieutenant Chester. Chester’s voice sounded scratchy, the platoon commander having just inhaled a pungent odor.
“Captain, something weird going on here. That vapor up ahead. You see any hot springs on the chart pre-op?”
“No, sir. Could be swamp gas.”
“Could be,” acknowledged Freeman, “but I’ve got a gut feeling we ought to stay put.”
Chester agreed, if for no other reason than he, like Colonel Tibbet and the others now under Freeman, knew that much of the general’s legendary reputation rested upon one simple fact: He was a meticulous observer. It was something first noted by Bob Norton, his old 2IC in Third Army. Norton, in a lecture at the Army Staff College, pointed out that most women could tell you the eye color of their close friends and acquaintances. Most men could not. Freeman could. There was something about the vapor he’d seen that bothered him. There was an eruption of marines’ small-arms fire off to their left, maybe 150 yards, at what was probably the first Russian they had seen in the marshes so far. The BTR’s turret immediately slewed in the direction of the firing, the BTR itself growling, exuding a coal black plume of diesel exhaust into the rain.
“C’mon, Kegg,” Aussie hissed. “Fire the fucking thing!”
The marine was using a tree at the edge of the woods to steady the weapon. It had been only twenty, thirty seconds at the most since Lieutenant Chester had summoned Kegg, but the BTR was picking up speed across the frozen marsh where shoulder-high stalks of ice-sheathed grass were starting to bend as the rain deiced them.
Suddenly the Russian behemoth foundered, its slanting chin breaking through the plate-thick ice. It was only a momentary pause, however, and the amphibian, its exhaust and bilge jet spouting up high at the rear, continued crashing forward in the marsh, deep enough now that the BTR was afloat, looking to Kegg like a mechanical hippopotamus moving inexorably toward the marines.
Young Kegg, having snapped the Javelin’s launch unit to the disposable launch tube and steadying the fire-and-forget fifty-pound weapon assembly against an aged Mongolian oak tree, looked through the four-power scope, centered the hulking BTR in the green and black of his infrared world, and fired. The kick motor flared, with minimal backblast for Kegg, then the one-two punch of the missile hit the BTR, the Javelin’s initial charge blasting down through the topmost layers of the BTR’s roof, the second, shaped charge piercing the armor proper. The BTR was now a crematorium. The vehicle stopped, its wake of dark, chocolate-colored diesel and exhaust-blown reeds pushing forward over it like a flood. Freeman saw the rear door open and heard the feral screams of rage and terror as two, perhaps three, Russian soldiers — it was difficult to tell how many in the fiery swirl of bodies and debris — came splashing out. One man was afire, trying futilely to swim toward the splintered and icy edge of the marsh, when the BTR’s munitions blew, making it look as if a cyclonic fire had hit.
Melissa Thomas felt her heart pounding in her chest, half in fear, half in — God help her! — empathy for the enemy as marine rifle fire ended the swimmer’s misery.
“Hold fire!” It was Freeman bellowing above the other nearby sounds of battle. “Follow me!” The general, breaking cover, Eddie Mervyn at his side, was running hard toward the lake but skirting its icy perimeter as Sal, Choir, Aussie, Johnny Lee, and the forty-man platoon followed.
“Good shooting, marine!” Chester told Kegg, and, seeing how shaken the boy was by what he’d done, knowing that there were eight, possibly nine, men cooked alive inside the BTR, added, “DARPA ALPHA, Kegg! Good shooting, marine!”
Kegg had difficulty hearing the lieutenant because of the noise off on their left flank where, he guessed, Colonel Tibbet’s HQ section must be engaging the Russians. And what the hell, wondered Kegg, was the general up to, running pell-mell, leading the first two squads of Chester’s four-squad platoon?
Kegg started in fright as Freeman’s team, closer to the lake with Chester’s first two squads, opened up on a five-ton Russian truck that came roaring through the steamy vapor, packed with helmeted troops and heading straight for the drowning BTR. An officer on the running board was shouting and waving his AK-47 at Freeman’s team and the lead marines. But neither the officer nor his troops in the back of the truck had seen Chester’s other two squads now emerging from the tall grass by the wood, the truck coming under such an enfilade of fire from these marines’ M-16s, SAWs, and H K submachine guns and Chester’s burst of six rounds in half a second, that it had no hope. Out of control, the vehicle started sliding at speed toward Freeman and his team, striking a hard clump of stunted and wind-knotted reeds by the lake’s edge with such force that it flipped and rolled. Bloodied bodies were strewn across the ice, weapons, mostly AK-47s, slithering, some of them sliding so far that they disappeared into the rain-freckled water of the marsh where the BTR was sinking, the tip of its whip aerial just visible, which told the ever-observant Freeman that the lake here was about ten feet deep.
Several of the Russians, still able to function, scrambled frantically on the ice, trying to retrieve their weapons, but Freeman’s team and Chester’s first squad of ten marines gave ABC’s troops little chance of recovery. Only one man from the truck survived the marines’ storm of depleted uranium. The ice seemed to come alive as frozen chips, some red with blood, flew into the air.
Then, suddenly, a head popped to the surface, followed by a pair of thrashing arms; a BTR crewman had survived. Though gasping frantically for air and dog-paddling furiously, the Russian plunged his right hand back into the water and came up firing his 9 mm pistol at Aussie, who dealt with the interruption with a burst from his H K. “Silly prick!”
“Look after these two,” ordered Freeman, indicating a forlorn and soaking-wet duo. One of them, rescued by Freeman, who had extended his unloaded AK-74 to the floundering man, was the only survivor of the BTR, the other, though slightly wounded, was the only trooper from the truck who had not been killed in the short but furious exchange. While Aussie, whose right calf had been nicked by one of the truck-borne soldiers, was having it attended to by the corpsman, it took Johnny Lee, the team’s interpreter, only five minutes, with the help of a grim-looking Eddie Mervyn, to conclude that neither of the two prisoners knew anything about the H-complex other than that they had been summoned for perimeter defense as part of some reciprocal arrangement between ABC’s H-block commanders.
What worried Freeman was that most of the dead soldiers were wearing blue-striped T-shirts beneath their sandy green battle jackets. Naval infantry. Together with Spetsnaz, SpecOps, and airborne infantry, these naval troops were the best the Russians had, and Freeman knew that despite the massive drawdown of military assets following Putin’s ascendancy to Boris Yeltsin’s throne amid the ruble’s nosedive, the naval infantry remained an elite fighting force.
“He keeps saying,” said Johnny Lee, pointing to one of the two prisoners, a thin, wiry type who had a bad burn on his left arm and was cradling it with his right, “that he and his comrade are POWs, says they’re—” Lee had to shout against the rattle of small-arms fire and the ear-ringing explosions of nearby battle. “—entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention.”
“Geneva what?” opined Aussie, smarting under the corpsman’s alcohol swab. “Tell ’im I haven’t seen that film.”
“No joking, Aussie,” Lee replied. “He’s claiming they’re regular troops called to secure the ABC perimeter, and as such—”
“And as such,” cut in Aussie, “they’re aiding and abetting fucking terrorists. If they’re regular troops, they shouldn’t fucking be here. Even Moscow’s declared ABC persona non grata. Right, General?”
“Correct,” said Freeman, adding quietly to Aussie, “at least for twenty-four hours.” The general then turned to Lee. “If I thought they knew anything more than the route out from ABC, Johnny, I’d shoot ’em if they didn’t cooperate.”
Chester, having managed to make radio contact with Tibbet’s HQ group so that close-in hand signals in the near-zero visibility were no longer needed, ordered nine of his ten four-man teams to spread out.
“Captain,” Freeman called to Chester, “I’d like my team to concentrate on finding entry. Those truck tracks should be visible for a while. I’ll call you the moment we get in.”
“You betcha,” acknowledged the marine lieutenant. “Stay well.”
“I’ll try,” said Freeman, turning over the two prisoners to Chester. Then he addressed his six team members. “Okay, guys. Everyone marine ID’d?”
They were, with small, infrared diamond shapes on the fronts and backs of their helmets and camouflage battle jackets.
It began snowing. “Aw, shit!” announced Sal. “That’s all we need.”
The four marines of the tenth fire team, ordered by Chester to stay behind to provide a perimeter defense for the arrival of the second wave of Stallions, if they’d come in zero visibility, plastic-stripped the two Russians. A corpsman, having given the burn victim a shot of morphine, assisted the team’s sniper in unlacing the Russians’ boots. And with a hastily invented sign language, they told the two POWs they’d be shot if they tried to run. The two navy infantry comrades nodded their heads vigorously. They understood.
“D’you think,” began one of the marines in a voice barely audible amid the increasingly confused sounds of the battle farther in, “the general was kidding about shooting these guys if he thought they knew more — you know, just shoot them?”
“Geneva Convention!” interjected the burn victim anxiously.
“Hey, you know English.”
“Little bit.”
“Yeah, well you know what shut the fuck up means?”
“Da!”
“The Geneva Convention,” said the sniper authoritatively, “does not apply to masked terrorists and those who aid and abet terrorists in any way.” The other three marines were impressed, more by their buddy’s matter-of-fact delivery than by the answer. After all, they knew how marines had viewed terrorists and fellow travelers in Iraq.
As Freeman led his team along the edge of the lake’s frozen western marsh, he could feel the pressure of the twenty-four-hour deadline mounting. Could the first wave hold long enough for the second wave, which would have to fly in on instruments alone, to land in the increasing foul weather? And could he find traces of the truck’s tires on the frozen ground before the snow hid them, showing him and his team the way back to ABC through the minefield that surrounded the H-block? And he of U-turn fame had brought in the first wave sans white coveralls. He had rolled dice with the meteorological officer’s report and lost. But his team was moving in the harmony that comes only with practice, with knowing how each man operates, with being able to recognize one another, even in the dark, by footfall alone. Everything was starting to look white, the rattle of machine guns sounding farther west now, away from the edge of the lake itself but still in the marshy area. The team could hear shouts, in English and in another language that Johnny Lee told Freeman was neither Russian nor Chinese. So far as Freeman knew, his team had been landed in the right grid, but he’d sensed from his short radio communications with Tibbet that while the colonel had been careful not to give coordinates, he had indicated, via slang, that his HQ platoon was on Freeman’s left, as it should be, but more than half a mile farther west, while Chester’s fire teams were spread out a hundred yards to Freeman’s right. Murphy, he of Murphy’s Law, was always waiting in the wings, as Freeman and his team had found out at Priest Lake, but despite everyone not landing precisely where he should, it sounded as if the first wave was at least moving in the direction of the terrorists’ H-block.
Passing through waist-high reeds, checking his wrist GPS, the general estimated that the outer limit of the half-mile-deep minefield that surrounded the ABC complex and from which Terry Chester had surmised swamp gas was rising was no more than fifty feet away to the right of Bravo Company’s line of advance. Douglas Freeman sniffed the snowy air, whiffs of cordite coming downwind in what was now a heavy, swirling snowfall. The general held up his hand and everyone stopped as he knelt in the cold, still marsh grass that was now shoulder high and completely hid him and the team from view, and saw tire tracks impressed in the frozen earth not yet completely covered by the snow because of a tree bough. He glanced back and saw Eddie Mervyn and Gomez only a few paces behind him, Sal, Choir, Johnny Lee, and Aussie farther back with the marines. Something which he couldn’t articulate at that moment cautioned him not to raise his voice, for while the snow-muffled thumps of the Russian mortars sounded about a mile off, the general’s experience of winter battles told him that the Russians were only half that distance away.
Then he realized why his sense of smell was giving his brain a flashing red signal: marsh gas stank. The marines who’d done their training in the intertidal swamps around Parris Island would know that too. Rotting vegetation gave off the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. There was no off-putting odor to this vapor. Maybe he’d been right all along and it was a hot spring. He gestured for Eddie and Gomez to come closer, and spoke softly. “See that vapor rising? About fifteen yards off by that clump of woods?” Both had seen it, assuming, as Lieutenant Chester had, that it was swamp gas. “It’s got no smell,” Freeman told them. “Watch the ground directly in front of you as well as our flanks.” Both men acknowledged his advice, knowing how easy it was not to do this when one was walking. Freeman, in the same low tone in which he’d instructed Gomez and Eddie to come with him, pointed to yet another wood on their left flank and instructed Aussie and the marines, “I want you to head over to that wood on our left flank.” The area he indicated was on high ground. It was about two acres in size, with brush and trees that would afford them good cover.
Aussie gave him a thumbs-up farther back at the head of the column, while Freeman, drawing his AK-74 bayonet, with Eddie Mervyn covering him with his shotgun and Gomez as Tail End Charlie for the three of them, approached the area where the vapor was coming from and which his GPS told him must be just a foot or two beyond the outer limit of the mined perimeter, while Aussie, Choir, Johnny Lee, and Sal, the two POWs, and Chester’s marines moved to the wood Freeman had indicated. The reeds were shoulder high, but as they walked farther and passed a small copse of wizened Mongolian oak, the ground underfoot was becoming higher, and quickly the reeds became shorter, so that in another fifteen feet they passed from shoulder-to knee-high reeds.
Suddenly something enormous burst out of the reeds. Eddie Mervyn was so startled he stepped back and fell, detonating a mine. The explosion ripped into his buttocks and groin, the mine’s detonation further terrifying any wildlife in the reeds, like the huge bird that had broken cover.
“Don’t move!” Freeman shouted at Gomez. Even as he was getting up, snow and earth were still raining down on him. Eddie was hemorrhaging severely, and the second wave’s relief choppers were at least one and a half hours away, if they made it. Freeman could have called in a high-priority Mayday, but that would have imperiled the entire team. He knew, as did Eddie, that in this situation the best that could be done was first aid and pumping him full of morphine so that, though he was already in violent spasm, the pain would be diminished.
Gomez, shaken despite all his SpecWar training, fumbled at first, almost dropping his helmet, before he managed to pull out his Ringer packet of four-inch, foam-gel-impregnated gauze pads. Freeman grabbed the packet, ripped open the waterproof seal, and used the six pads as one compress on the gaping wound between Eddie’s legs, the gauze becoming one with the wound and, under the pressure of Freeman’s hand, stanching the hemorrhaging, as Gomez, recovering his wits, injected Eddie with 10 cc of morphine for the pain.
“It’s all right, Eddie,” Gomez told him. “We’re getting you medevaced. You’ll be out of here in—”
“Lying son of a — oh, God, God, help me!”
Aussie was getting Johnny Lee, Choir, Sal, and the marines ready for a rescue squad, but knew that Freeman wouldn’t request it, as it would put more lives at risk in a possible minefield. All Aussie could do for the present was to form a C-section defense on the perimeter of the wood, should the Russians send out anyone to investigate. “Bastards aren’t gonna find a fucking fox next time they come nosin’ around here!”
No one but Choir, who’d been sitting next to Aussie in the helo and heard Freeman and the helo’s crew chief talking about the fox, knew what he meant. Choir flicked his H K’s safety to off as the general and Gomez carried Eddie back to the shelter of the copse of Mongolian oak.
As if the enemy had heard Aussie’s comment, the team and marines heard the guttural roar of a big diesel. This time it wasn’t a BTR or truck that showed up but a BMD, a fighting infantry vehicle. Another amphibian, but this one a post-Putin top-of-the-line, air-transportable BMD-3. For a tracked monster, it was moving fast, at forty miles per hour, its metal treads throwing up a high wake of powder snow as it skirted the ice along the edge of the lake before slowing and then entering the marsh reeds. Then it stopped a hundred yards from where the mine had exploded and began to hose the reeds across a fifty-yard front with its 30 mm anti-aircraft cannon and its coaxia l7.62 mm machine gun. In the copse of oak, where Freeman and Gomez lay protecting either side of Eddie, Gomez checked Eddie’s vital signs. They were all bad. Amid the wood-chopping racket of the BMD strafing the reeds and firing in the general direction of the wood where Aussie and the marines were hunkered down, Eddie’s voice faded to a weak rasp and he uttered a desperate plea for his mother.
Freeman turned sharply to Eddie. “Leave your mother out of this and stop whining. You’ll be fine. A new flexidick and you’ll be pushing pussy in no time. That son of yours, the four-year-old, what’s his name? Foster?”
“Yeah,” Eddie managed to groan.
“Well, hang on to that. You’re gonna go bowling with him.” He took off his Fritz and handed it to Gomez. “Another gel pack. Quickly.”
“What’s your girl’s name, Eddie?” Freeman asked, even though he knew it.
“I — what — Melanie. I need medevac.”
“Don’t we all!” joshed Freeman. “You’ll be fine. Just keep thinking about bowling with young Foster. We’ll get you out on the second wave.”
Eddie was rolling from side to side in pain.
“Stay still, Eddie.”
“They’re gone!” he moaned. “My balls’ve been—”
“They’re fine,” Freeman lied. “Just a bit mussed up.”
“Oh God,” Eddie moaned. “Give me a shot of morphine for crying out—”
“We just did.”
Freeman glimpsed a straight white vapor trail that streaked from the wood through the falling snow, saw the BMD buck and its right track unravel off its steel wheels. The explosion of the BMD’s magazine was so violent that it sent a searing wind through the trees, whipping up dead branches and flinging them against the denuded trunks and the log behind which Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn had sought shelter.
“Payback One to Payback Two,” Freeman whispered hoarsely. “You receive?”
“Loud but sliced,” came Aussie’s reply, which meant that Freeman’s transmission was segmented.
“Are you receiving?” asked the general, his speech more deliberate.
“Loud and clear now.”
“Eddie’s gonna make it,” Freeman said, more for Eddie’s morale than from conviction. Gomez and the general had stopped the bleeding, but Eddie’s chances were fifty-fifty unless they could get some lactate into him and stabilize. For that they needed saline. The general quickly considered the options. He and Gomez could carry Eddie to Choir, who had the saline, or Choir could bring it to them. Freeman decided while it might seem more logical for Choir to come to Mervyn, that Choir, Aussie, Lee, and the others in the wood were in a more sheltered and thus safer area in which to treat Eddie than by the log. Besides, if Choir were to be shot down trying to reach them, then Freeman’s SpecFor team would be without saline. Still, as he helped heave Eddie onto Gomez’s back, he knew it was a gamble. ABC, with its apparently unlimited resources, was no doubt listening in to field communications, and despite the best efforts of McCain’s SES to jam the Russians, it would take less than a minute for any state-of-the-art Russian computer radio-frequency scanner to zero in on the American sources of transmission.
“Let’s go!” Freeman told Gomez, who was still shaken by the horror of Eddie’s wound. Eddie had confessed his fear of just such a wound, the one most feared by men, during the days when he was Gomez’s swim buddy at SEAL school in Coronado.
A surge of small-arms firing, at least platoon-sized, could be heard erupting farther west of the lake where the bulk of Tibbet’s marines had landed, closer to the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains than planned. While Freeman and Tibbet’s HQ group were also west of the lake, they were closest to it and to the H-block, which no one had yet reported seeing in the foul weather. Indeed, the one thing Freeman, Terry Chester, Colonel Tibbet, and their men were certain of was that there was no certainty about the disposition of units in this first wave of more than six hundred troops, and no clear picture of the emerging battlefield. It was impossible to discern meaningful patterns from the mélange of radio traffic that included orders, some frantic, from both the Russians and the Americans, whose transmissions were often jumbled in the frequency-jumping of both sides. It was always the same — not knowing where everybody was and the concomitant worry about the possibility of blue on blue.
This time when Freeman, with Gomez carrying Eddie, retraced their earlier path through the reeds, following their now barely discernible footprints in the falling snow, the general made sure that neither he nor Gomez wandered off the path lest they too detonate a rogue mine.
The vapor the general had been on his way to investigate was still rising from a multitude of tennis-ball-sized bubbles breaking open through the cracked ice that had fissured at the base of the reeds on the high ground where he, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez had been walking when an enormous gray bird had shattered the ice-polished reeds, flying up into the swirling whiteness of vapor and snow that hung over the marshland. Perhaps, thought Freeman, the Komissarov River, fed by runoff from the Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, was a conduit of hot spring water pouring into the lake. But there was still no smell emitted by the vapor, which here and there created ballpark-sized areas of dense fog next to areas where there was no vapor rising and where visibility improved up to twenty feet.
It was Gomez who first heard the freight-train shuffles of approaching artillery—122 mms, Freeman guessed — and while the rest of the team immediately fell flat to the ground, the circular rubberized nose cone of the Predator tube that Aussie had slung on his back swung around hard, hitting him in the nose and starting a bleed. While all the marines in the area also hit the dirt, Freeman told Gomez not to move. To remain standing was counterintuitive, but it was better than moving off the path through the reeds and risking detonating a mine.
The two screaming shells fell short with a tremendous “whoomp!” their explosions sending huge shards of ice whooshing through the air. One of the surfboard-sized splinters slammed into a copse of pines and disintegrated into smaller pieces that tumbled down like broken glass around Freeman, Gomez, and Eddie. It told Freeman two things: one, that the Russian terrorists were definitely scanning, and, two, that they’d reacted far more quickly than he’d anticipated on the basis of hearing a simple transmit, sending out their state-of-the-art BMD-3 to investigate the tripping of the anti-personnel mine. Were their inner defenses so much weaker inside the perimeter, Freeman wondered, that they worried about one measly anti-personnel mine going off? There had to be another reason, the general concluded, for the panicky response of trying to kill a few soldiers with artillery.
“You all right?” Freeman asked Gomez who, despite being in A-1 physical condition, was straining under the weight of his comatose friend.
“Yeah,” answered Gomez. “It’ll be better once we get moving.”
As Freeman took point, his right hand, from force of habit, reached for his radio mike, then he checked himself. The best he could hope for was that Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee would see him and Gomez, carrying Eddie, making their way over the two hundred yards to the protection of the wood. As fast as caution allowed, Freeman, followed by Gomez, began to move out through the tall reeds, hearing gunfire closing in from the west, with more artillery rounds screaming in, exploding in and around the position they’d just vacated. Freeman’s ability to retrace their steps out of the reeds with surprising speed, given the bad weather, was due to the general’s photographic memory. His skill in noting and remembering minute details along the way was less innate than learned in battles all over the world, from featureless deserts, where windstorms could obliterate telltale tracks, to Arctic storms, where falling snow threatened to do the same. And Gomez’s ability to keep up a good pace, despite having to bear his wounded comrade on his back, was mute testimony to the extraordinary level of physical fitness Freeman’s SpecWar warriors habitually maintained.
As Freeman and Gomez broke out of the tall marsh reeds below the vapor-covered mound that was the local high ground, they could hear more incoming. The eerie shuffling sound was much closer now, becoming a scream, the rounds’ explosions shaking the ground beneath them, geysers of earth, dirty snow, and reeds shooting high into the frigid air then raining down on the mound twenty yards behind them where there were more eruptions as anti-personnel mines were detonated by the concussion.
In his determination to reach the protection of the wood and the two Russian prisoners, the general, always cognizant of a potential blue on blue in the confusion of combat, especially here in fog and snow, raised his AK-74, the “stay-where-you-are” signal, in the direction of the wood where he hoped Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee were still waiting for him to arrive.
Suddenly Gomez stopped. “Hold up, General.” Then, “You hear that?”
“Yes,” acknowledged Freeman. “There must be hundreds of them over there.”
Gomez, tiring quickly now, realized that the general had mistaken his question. Freeman was talking about the scores of birds gathered in another section of the vaporous marsh. “No,” said Gomez, Eddie’s weight getting to him now. “I mean the Hummer.” It had stopped at the wood now only thirty yards away. The Hummer was topped with two four-tube canisters of TOW anti-tank missiles.
“Where the fuck were they earlier when we needed them?” Aussie challenged. Still, he was glad to see the vehicle. Everybody was glad to see it.
A marine corporal had stepped out of the Hummer, followed by two other marines dressed in “snow whites,” one of whom was Kegg.
“Where’d you get those?” Freeman asked.
“Dead Russians,” one of them said, grinning, until he saw how badly Eddie was injured. Quickly, Kegg helped Gomez, the general asking for saline from the Hummer’s kit.
“Good man,” said Freeman, as Kegg’s marine buddy handed him the pack. Choir also brought a saline pouch. Freeman now turned to the four marines in the fire team nearest the wood’s perimeter. “Where are the two pricks?”
“The prisoners?” said a marine. “We tied ’em up over there behind that brush, General.”
A marine corporal glanced uneasily at the other three marines in his fire squad as the general strode toward the two Russians. They were sitting forlornly in the wood under cover of a huge, snow-laden fir, its branches gnarled and deformed over the years from the bitter, grit-laden westerlies that came sweeping down from the Wanda Shan in China and on through the nearby foothills of Zapadnyy Siniy before howling, bansheelike, across the thirty-five-mile-wide expanse of the lake, on whose closer shore ABC had built its Stalinesque H-block, which at the moment lay hidden by the blizzard that had made a mockery of McCain’s optimistic weather forecast.
“I’m tired of this damn weather,” Freeman opined formally to no one in particular, but his tone alerted his teammates that the general, in the manner of George Patton, was about to voice a direct request to the Almighty to intercede on behalf of Operation Bird Rescue. Before this, however, Freeman gave instructions for Gomez and a marine corpsman to do what was possible as soon as possible for Eddie Mervyn who, despite having received an infusion of saline, seemed to have slipped further into coma. Freeman prayed they could keep Eddie alive long enough for the SpecWar warrior to be medevaced out by one of the choppers in the second wave.
Both Russian captives were visibly alarmed when the American general, whom Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had described as a madman, suddenly took off his helmet and, holding it under his left arm, his AK-74 cradled in the other, bowed his head. The Russian duo were clearly alarmed by the general’s body language. Was it the prelude to executing prisoners?
While the four marines, including the corpsman who was helping Gomez with Eddie, exchanged uneasy glances, the general’s SpecWar team, with an ease obviously born of practice, formed a protective square around their general who, amid the sounds of intermittent gunfire far and near, began his prayer, his hair turning white with the snow that showed no sign of abating.
“Almighty God, we beseech Thee in this battle to afford us better weather so that we might vanquish our terrorist foes and destroy their evil here and forevermore. Amen.”
With this, Freeman put his helmet back on and turned to Salvini. “Sal, cut ’em loose.”
As Sal drew his SAS knife, the younger of the two ABC Russians, a lean, short man in his early thirties who didn’t speak English, stiffened in fright, looking imploringly at his comrade, who did know some English, for an explanation of what was happening. Had the mad American’s prayer been for his prisoners? A last rite before he executed them?
“General!”
It was Gomez in shock, his face crumbling, his shoulders shaking in a futile effort to dam his emotions, so that the moment he’d called the general, every man present knew that Eddie Mervyn was dead. Freeman’s eyes were turned intently upon the two prisoners, not wildly ablaze with anger but with an unblinking cold rage. It was the kind of rage they’d seen in the eyes of Comrade General Abramov, the commander of the tank and armored company, when Abramov had been told that one of their terrorist clients had tried a double cross on a big payment for a railcar full of Igla shoulder-fired MANPADs shipped from the nearby railhead at Kamen Rybolov and across the wooden bridges of the marshes to the south. There was no pity in the comrade general’s eyes. Instinctively, the two Russians, still sitting on the ground, moved their backs against the trunk of the big fir tree, as if it might give them some protection from what the American might do. They watched nervously as the Americans’ general got down on one knee, looking at the dead American who had been his comrade in arms. As inconspicuously as possible, the two prisoners looked at the marines and the rest of Freeman’s team for any expression or body language that might convey what the prevailing mood might be amongst them, whether the grief would turn to anger, both prisoners knowing what they would do had the situation been reversed. The edict from Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin had been unequivocal: All of the American “gangsters” were to be summarily executed. And the edict wasn’t confined to the Americans, as demonstrated by ABC’s ruthless “cleansing” of those “elements” in the civilian population around the lake who had had the temerity to protest ABC’s takeover. Dozens of corpses had been dumped in the vast, surrounding marshlands.
As Freeman, handing his AK-74 to a marine, looked down at Eddie Mervyn’s boyish face, he was also seeing the faces of the dead, the murdered at DARPA ALPHA, and the smoking funeral pyre of the thousands at Ground Zero. Taking off his gloves, he closed Eddie’s eyes, but the eyelid muscle retracted the lids, and Aussie Lewis handed Freeman two small stones that did the job, Freeman having been as insistent as any DI on Parris Island that his men not carry any change into combat.
Freeman rose quickly from the snowy ground of the wood and then, with an abruptness that belied the gentleness he’d shown kneeling by Eddie, he asked Aussie Lewis whether the wood’s perimeter had been secured.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are the bastards now?”
“Don’t know for sure, General, but most of the noise is coming from the north of us, about two miles away. I’d say they’re giving Tibbet hell.”
The general didn’t respond, but turned abruptly toward the prisoners, and Aussie Lewis saw in his eyes the metamorphosis from soldier to avenger of all those Americans murdered since 9/11. “Which one of you speaks English? A little!” This phrase was said with such menace that the Russian who spoke English was reluctant to admit to the fact, but he remembered that it was one of this man’s soldiers whom he had told, “I speak a little.” He raised his hand so tentatively, “I do, sir,” that he might have been a schoolboy terrified of his teacher.
“Now you listen to me, you son of a bitch!” The general was taking his sidearm from its holster. “You understand ‘son of a bitch’?” he asked the Russian.
The prisoner nodded, the cold fury in this American’s face so obvious that the Russian’s throat constricted, rendering him temporarily unable to speak, and he could feel his skin now itching like crazy.
“Sir,” interrupted the marine.
“What?”
“Sir, I think I hear armor ’bout a quarter of a mile away to the west.”
This only added to the general’s sense of urgency. He was still glaring at the hapless Russian. “Do you understand—”
More freight-train-like rushes came shuffling through the pristine air, the rounds exploding with a roar which, though muffled by the snow, nevertheless was still deafening, and left the general’s ears ringing.
“Stand up!” Freeman ordered them. “You know why I asked you to stand?”
The smaller of the two whey-faced prisoners looked imploringly at his English-speaking partner. What was going on?
“You want us to stand,” said the English speaker. “We stand.”
“You’re standing,” Freeman told them, “because I do not shoot men when they are sitting. You understand that, you terrorist turd?”
It was clear to Chester that while the Russian didn’t cotton on to every word, he understood readily enough and was terrified.
“Now, you told us you came from the H-block, from the building, but you know nothing about the building. Correct?”
The Russian nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously. “Correct, Admiral.”
Chester bit his lip to stop himself from smiling. He could see that the Russian was far too terrified to even try making a joke.
“I am a general,” Freeman told them unsmilingly. “And you have murdered thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
The English-speaking Russian found voice to tell his comrade what had transpired.
“Nyet, nyet!” the Russian speaker was repeating.
“Da!” retorted Freeman, with such resounding authority both men fell silent. He fixed his stare on the English speaker. “Your name?”
“My name?”
“Yes, goddammit. Your name!”
“Ilya. My comrade’s name is Boris.”
“Ilya, you and your comrade know more about ABC’s setup than you’ve told us.”
Ilya was shaking his head as vigorously as Boris had. “We have not been inside much. I swear on mother’s grave.”
It was never good practice to talk too much to prisoners, Freeman knew. Their names and conversation lent humanity to their otherwise sullen or scared faces. But Freeman, as Colonel Tibbet had told his marines, kept in mind the sight of the seemingly endless funeral processions after the terrorist attacks on America since 9/11, and the bravery of the victims, the people on Flight 93 and the scientist at DARPA ALPHA with “RAM” and “SCARUND” written on the note in his hand.
“You steal our plans,” said Freeman, slowly and deliberately, ignoring the cacophony of battle just a mile south and west of him down by the rail line, “then sell them to other terrorists who kill our children. You help them. You are as guilty as they are. You’re not prisoners of war, you’re opportunists, outlawed by your own people in Moscow. You’re co-murderers. Terrorists!”
The Russian prisoners didn’t understand “co,” but “murderers” and “terrorists” they did understand, and now looked grim in addition to being scared. They didn’t whimper. They were, after all, opportunists who had been trained as soldiers. Outlawed by their country as terrorists, regular soldiers turned bad, and they’d been told by Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin to expect no mercy from Moscow or the “American interventionists” if they were caught. They had crossed the line, becoming fantastically wealthy by Russian standards, their MANPAD bonuses alone catapulting their lifestyle into another world, way above that of the average Russian.
“Koreans,” burst out Ilya. “We are not only people involved. Koreans are helping.”
Freeman was nonplussed. He could hear more incoming. What was this Ilya telling him about Koreans? “Tell me more,” Freeman urged.
The other Russian, Boris, couldn’t conceal his surprise at Ilya having mentioned the Koreans, who Freeman quickly surmised must be either one of ABC’s best customers — or joint manufacturers?
“Tell me more,” Freeman pressed.
“Nyet!” cautioned Boris, and Freeman shot him dead, Ilya jumping sideways in fright.
“Holy shit!” It was the Hummer corporal.
“Be quiet!” ordered Freeman, and turned the gun on Ilya. “Tell me about the Koreans. Quickly!”
Ilya’s hands shot up in mute surrender, the body of his dead comrade spread-eagled in the scant snowfall that had penetrated the thick branches of the fir tree like clumps of icing sugar on the dead man’s chest, his eyes wide open, his expression grotesque, as if his dentist had just asked him to open wide.
Ilya was trembling. “Believe me, Admiral, I have not much been in ABC. It is not a lie.”
“What about the Koreans, dammit?!”
“They are—” He couldn’t think of the word.
“General.” It had taken a lot of guts for the marine corporal to speak after being expressly told by Freeman not to, but the sound of the armor was getting closer.
“What?”
“Tank, sir. Getting closer. Can’t see ’em yet in the fog, but—”
“Then go find them and take them out. Do your job, man.”
“Yessir.” The corporal’s right hand circled in a “rev up” motion and the other two marines, who’d given the white overalls they’d taken from the dead Russians to two of the four fire team marines, jumped back into the Hummer, Chester telling Melissa Thomas to join them. The corporal called back to the fire team. “There’ll probably be infantry behind this fucker when we see it, so you boys be ready to give us an assist when we nose out of these trees to fire.”
“You’ve got it, Corp.”
Ilya was perspiring, babbling something, but neither Freeman nor Johnny Lee could understand him, the Russian in such a state of emotional turmoil that words wouldn’t come to him, and so he made as if he was shoveling.
“That better not be bullshit,” the general snapped without a trace of humor, never more serious in his life. “What do you mean? Trenches?”
Ilya was in a frantic charade, and he, like Freeman, had never been more serious in his life.
“Don’t try to think of the word,” Lee told Ilya. “It’ll only go farther away.” But apparently the thought of what the admiral would do to him if he didn’t make it clear only heightened the prisoner’s anxiety in his search for the English word. In desperation, he ceased his shoveling motion, and instead gave Lee the word in Russian. “Fonar.”
“Flashlight?” said Lee.
“Da!” said Ilya, making as if he was walking through a—
“Tunnel!” said Freeman.
“Da! Tunnels! Yes, Admiral. Tunnels.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Incoming!” warned Aussie. A tremendous crash of steel ripping into timber followed. Everyone was down for cover except Freeman, grabbing Ilya by the lapel. “Where are the tunnels? Mother of—” He remembered the vapor coming from the high ground, vapor that had no smell. Heating vents! ABC’s weapons were being made underground!
Freeman pointed his H K 9 mm sidearm down at the ground. “Down there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Entrances?” Freeman asked next. “Johnny, ask him if there’s one entrance, two, how many? An entrance for each tunnel?”
Ilya, realizing that information was his only salvation, was now speaking at such a rate that Lee had to slow him down.
“He says that for security reasons there’s only one main entrance for all three tunnels, and this is deep under the H-block, under the administration offices.”
“Is it North Koreans who are building the tunnels?” Freeman asked.
“Da, General.” With Boris supine beside him in the snow, Ilya was suddenly a gold mine of information. The gist of what he was saying was that the North Korean Communists who, as Freeman and anyone with even a passing acquaintance with North Korea knew, had watched American air supremacy over Korea in awe during the war of 1950–53, had also realized that in future wars, the only way for industry of any kind to survive American air-power would be to do as their North Vietnamese comrades had done in Cu Chi, that is, to burrow underground, deep underground, so deep that their military garrisons and factories couldn’t be penetrated by the American bunker-busters that had laid waste to Saddam Insane’s regime. What Ilya was also explaining was that in exchange for desperately needed foreign currency, the North Koreans’ tunnelers extraordinaire had been engaged by ABC to do the dirty “hard yakka” labor, as Aussie would have called it, of burrowing deep into one of the rock spars that speared out into the marshes from the base of the nearby Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, the deep missile assembly and storage plant located ninety feet underground and heated by harnessing the hot spring conduits that vented in and about Lake Khanka’s marshes.
The crash of artillery rounds from the creeping, rather than target-specific, barrage had now passed beyond the wood, but had the enemy armor done the same?
“Can you hear any armor?” the general asked Lee, aware that his own hearing was deficient in what he had described to Margaret as the high, birdsong “trill and squeak range.”
“No, sir,” answered Lee. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Freeman’s intuition told him something particularly troubling was afoot. Was ABC’s rebel infantry following the tank? And had they now spread out, moving stealthily through the sea of reeds toward the last radio spot? If so, this meant the Russians would have to pass by the wood before they reached the SOT farther west from which he had radioed Aussie in the wood.
For now, despite all his impatience to find the tunnels — if Ilya was telling the truth — the general knew they would have to find the tank. In the event of a second wave, a tank could destroy as many helos as it had rounds, killing a hovering Stallion with one shot from its main gun, its coaxial 12.7 mm heavy machine gun obliterating any of the troop carrier’s surviving marines.
“Damn!” said Freeman. He whipped out a small notebook from his thigh pocket and a small, flexi-grip indelible pencil that was firm enough to make a note with but not hard enough to be a deadly piece of shrapnel, as hard plastic or alloyed ballpoint pens were prone to become when their owners were hit. In Iraq, on the day Aussie had shot the bomb-belted “woman” running at him with little Blue Eyes, Aussie had seen a Brit sapper who’d lost an eye because a plastic ballpoint pen had disintegrated when he’d been nicked at chest level by a round from a terrorist’s AK-47. The plastic pen had shattered, but its “ball” had perforated the Brit’s eyeball, also taking out the optic nerve.
“Draw me a picture of the entrance,” Freeman told Ilya. “Any lie, you understand — propaganda bullshit — and you die, Ilya. Understand?”
Johnny Lee told Ilya the same thing in Russian, just to make sure.
The Russian, left hand trembling, though less now than it had been when the general had shot Boris, began drawing a diagram of the H-block building, telling Freeman that it was very cold inside it. “No warming,” Ilya told them, “so it does not show on satellites.”
“Ah,” Freeman said, “that’s why it doesn’t give off a heat signature for the satellites’ IR lens.”
“Everyone in the tunnels,” said Ilya, “wears down-filled Gore-Tex. You know Gore-Tex?”
“Everyone knows Gore-Tex,” said Freeman. “Show me something I don’t know. Show me where the tunnel entrance is.”
“Okay, Ad — General. I’m telling you truth now. No propaganda bullshit.”
“You’d better be, son, or you can join Boris.”
If the Russian thought the conversation between his captor and himself was going to produce any kind of Stockholm effect, his captor coming around to understanding why he and Boris, in the chaos of post — Cold War Russia, had thrown in their lot with ABC and helped kill innocent Americans for money, it wasn’t going to happen. There was no room in Freeman’s mind for these slaughterers of civilians. Freeman glanced through the white blobs of snow-covered bush at the wood’s perimeter out at the fog-blanketed whiteness of the reeds, anxious to see Melissa Thomas and the three other marines returning in the Hummer. Either that or the sweet-sounding swish of a TOW missile en route to enemy armor.
He glanced back down at Ilya’s drawing, showing three tunnels ninety feet below the surface accessed by elevator from the H-block. At the base of the elevator there was a large open area from which the tunnels branched and which was sealed off from the elevator shaft by large double doors. The tunnels themselves were about ten feet in diameter and six feet apart and ran parallel to one another for a distance of about three hundred feet. Thru-ways that connected the tunnels were spaced at fifty-foot intervals.
“Ask him,” Freeman told Lee impatiently, “what the arrangement is in each tunnel. What’s being made?”
Ilya, sensing the general’s agitated mood, responded quickly. He labeled the three tunnels “A, B, C,” for Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin respectively, explaining to Lee that one was for installing missile motors, the second for electronics, anti-infrared guidance, et cetera, and the third tunnel was for the installation of warheads.
“Where’s the exit?” asked Freeman.
“Entrance is also exit.”
“That’s dumb. You go ninety feet underground and the tunnels run for three hundred feet. What if there’s fire?”
“Exit still being dug by Koreans here.” Ilya pointed to the end of the three fingerlike tunnels where they converged in a fifty-foot-diameter area. “Same size as the entrance.”
“Is it finished?”
“Almost. One more month. Maybe less. There is much blasting by the Koreans but this delays assembly and our three big bosses in ABC—” He indicated the H-block he’d crudely drawn sitting ninety feet above where the tunnels began. “—They are not so interested in making exit for workers, only making more missiles to sell.”
“To sell to terrorists!” Freeman charged.
“Yes,” said Ilya, looking more chagrined than sorry. The Russian moved his map of the three tunnels around for Johnny Lee to get a better view, thus affirming his cooperative spirit.
“He’s telling us,” Lee told Freeman, “that many of the parts for the weaponry are stacked in the interconnecting tunnels, and no smoking is allowed in any of the tunnels.”
“Now,” Freeman told Ilya softly, his tone nevertheless pregnant with authority, “draw the way in through the minefield. You’ll be in the front vehicle, comrade!”
Ilya flinched, so did Freeman, as another arty battery opened up, sending more freight train rounds on their mission to kill U.S. marines. Freeman glanced at his watch. If Thomas, Kegg, and the other two marines, including the corporal, didn’t return in ten minutes, he was going to break cover and go after ABC’s armor. Unless the tank was disabled, the second helo wave, as well as his and Tibbet’s marines already on the ground, was doomed. Like so many plans he’d seen in civilian and military life, everything, as the academics at staff college sometimes said, “was in a state of flux” or, as Aussie succinctly put it, “everything was going to rat shit.”
The snow was falling even more heavily now and there was still no sign of Melissa Thomas, Kegg, the other marine, and the corporal, or enemy armor. It was as if everything had been swallowed up in what was now a full-blown blizzard, the wood as silent as a tomb, Freeman’s team and Chester’s marines statuelike in the swirling whiteness. Even the sound of the small-arms fire and the occasional scream of Russian MANPADs, which the Russians were using as ground-to-ground munitions in the absence of any discernible radar signatures in the air, were muted. Many of Colonel Tibbet’s men had still failed to link up due to the erratically spaced landings the big Stallions had been forced to make due to the Cobras’ sudden midair collision. To further discombobulate the Americans, the Russians had affixed a small, thimblesized Stuka screamer to their artillery rounds and some of their missiles, designed, as had been the Nazi prototype, to instill ice-cold terror into their potential victims. The first time he heard it, Freeman immediately recalled the stories of his great-grandfather, who had served as a liaison officer in the American International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, about how the inhabitants of Guernica had been the first nonmilitary target in history to be flattened by the Luftwaffe, Goering’s air force, practicing on the unarmed civilians of the town as a curtain raiser to the Nazis’ blitzkrieg — lightning war — that began World War II.
The sound of a broad front battle had dropped off from the more or less sustained ripping noise of machine gun fire, guttural roars of big Triple A, and the high-pitched screaming of the heat-seeking MANPADs, to pockets of noise. These erupted spasmodically from what Freeman guessed were isolated squads of infantry and four-man fire teams, the backbone of the MEU, engaging Russian patrols and gun emplacements, all of which the snow would be covering, helping to camouflage the terrorists’ positions against the attacking marines. Those not engaged in these isolated clashes were in a physical state reminiscent of suspended animation, each marine’s body wound up like an alarm clock, the alarm due to go off at any moment, but no one knowing quite when. Every marine, as well as Freeman’s team, was praying for the arrival of the second wave, but every one of them knew it would be a hard thing for Tibbet to have to send the enciphered message to “come on down,” the old quiz shows’ phrase a current favorite of marine slang, though Melissa Thomas was more often than not the recipient of Oprah Winfrey’s ubiquitous “You go, girl!” a double-edged encouragement thrown at her as she’d struggled to stay afloat in Parris Island’s Water Facility.
While one marine and the marine corporal remained in the Hummer, Thomas and Kegg were kneeling in a natural blind of shoulder-high reeds whose formerly frost-stiffened stalks were now starting to yield to the weight of snow as pea-sized powder crystals gave way to bigger, sloppier flakes that adhered and quickly accumulated on the stalks. Melissa knew that if she and her fire-team buddy Kegg didn’t move soon, the reeds would be bent over by the weight of snow to knee height and lower, and both marines knew that the prone position, in what was now a four-to five-inch snow cover, some drifts back at the wood more than a foot deep, was not the position from which to do any useful recon. Everything in this sector, less than a mile west of the lake, had become unnervingly quiet since the as-yet-unseen tank could no longer be heard.
Marine Thomas, moving her right arm with glacial slowness, had managed to squirt a shot of “defrost” on her rifle’s long thermal-imaging Nite-Sight scope, and knew she had one of the mag’s five 7.62 mm Match Grade rounds already chambered, and the rifle’s trigger weight set for a three-instead of a five-pound pull. She knew that even in good weather a quick shot was often difficult to get off in time, and that in these near-zero-visibility conditions it would be impossible, were it not for the scope’s infrared capacity. All she needed was a heat bleed, a man’s head moving, a blurry-edged white spot against a green background. But she’d never before fired at another human being, and not from five hundred yards. In the abstract, she had no doubt, but now, here, her heart pounding under the stress, the cold, it was the same feeling she’d experienced when first she stood on the edge of the water tank on Parris Island. And choked. “Remember,” Kegg had told her as they’d alighted from the Hummer into the reeds, “the terrorist assholes we’ll be hunting will be trying to take us out before our guys can consolidate and go looking for the H-block. And, shit, it’s their home ground.”
He was right, but she reminded herself the marines had gone over the 3-D computer-generated SATPIX maps of the area ad nauseam, so that, despite the all-but-featureless expanse of the reeds here, west of the lake and less than five miles north of the railhead at Kamen Rybolov, each marine, with his GPS wristwatch, should know where he was.
Though not speaking, Melissa, Kegg, and the two others, by carefully studying their thigh-pocket charts, had estimated that they were less than two miles from the H-block, whose vague outline had shown up on SATPIX, and that the tank they had heard must have stopped, for even given the sound-suppressing quality of snow, the nails-on-chalkboard-like screech of steel treads on steel wheels should have been audible.
Then Melissa heard movement, slight yet distinct, about twenty feet off at two o’clock. Was it a bird, like the one who’d spooked that guy in the reeds who in turn had triggered the anti-personnel mine? Or was it someone moving? And if so, friend or foe? Kegg heard it too, and froze, ready with his M4 5.6 mm carbine. This shortened M16, with grenade launcher attached, was more easily handled in the reeds than an M-10, and Melissa saw the tip of his trigger finger ready to either unleash a 40 mm grenade or fire a flush-out burst of 5.56 mm rounds. But the same questions dogged him: Was it a man or an animal? A mistake could cost you your life or the haunting-till-you-die agony of having initiated a blue-on-blue. Melissa wanted to raise her sniper’s rifle for a quick look through the scope, but that’d be like waving a flag, besides which even the slightest movement would cause the reeds to move. She heard a hissed, “Ga ja!” Kegg saw reeds shivering, and fired, not a profligate hosing of ammo but a marine-style burst, into the middle of the rustle. Melissa fired from the hip, seeing green-white reeds exploding in burnt-brown fragments as her heavy 7.62 mm round tore its path through the vegetation in a nanosecond. For her, however, time morphed into that strange slow motion that danger decrees, when time for those involved irrationally stands still.
Then screaming and chaos as a firefight erupted. Melissa, punched backward, saw three figures, heard, “Ga ja! Ga ja!” again, Kegg lobbing a grenade and dropping down next to her, a mad rushing like a bull charging amid the crash and flame of the grenade, and more feral screaming.
The Hummer broke cover from the shoulder-high reeds twenty yards back, the corporal driving hard into the reeds, the other marine manning the front-right-door machine gun, its red tracer cutting through the snow-bent stalks in a segmented red line ending where he’d seen the trouble, the corporal careful to steer east of the GPS vector that marked the edge of the mined moat of frozen marsh around the H-block, the latter still unseen but supposedly there, SATPIX verified.
Three terrorists were down, all dead from what Kegg could make out, but his marine training had instilled in him the caution needed when approaching a downed enemy. Terrorists, more than any other combatants marines had encountered, except perhaps for the South Seas detachment of the Japanese Army in 1941–45, were known to booby-trap their dead and themselves, lying on a grenade, pin pulled, the weight of their body holding down the spring lever. You rolled them over at your peril. Melissa found it excruciating to breathe; the impact from the terrorist’s AK-47 burst, or rather from the one shot that had hit her in the chest, although having been stopped by her flak jacket, had caused an enormous and painful welt on her left breast, the shock of the hit having penetrated deep into her chest, and, she suspected, broken a rib. But there was no way she was going to complain and become the whining bitch. If she did so, it’d be in e-mails home from Yorktown—if they got out of this mess. She could imagine the leads: “Congressman Calls for End to Female Combatants” “‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Home, Not on the Battlefield,’ Say Southern Baptist Bishops.”
“You okay?” asked Kegg, who, while he kept his eyes on the three bodies, stood up slowly, his M4’s clip-on launcher having another grenade up the spout just in case.
“Yeah,” she told him.
Kegg moved off to the right to avoid being in her line of fire. “Cover me,” he told her.
The terrorists looked dead, from head shots and grenade shrapnel, but he knew he had to be sure, feel the wrist pulse. Melissa, the fifteen pounds of her M40A1 sniper rifle feeling like a ton, covered him, the pain in her rib cage feeling like someone twisting an ice-cold knife inside, every intake of air an act of will.
There was no pulse in any of them. He wasn’t going to turn them over. Even so, he and Melissa could see they were two Caucasian terrorists and an Asian — Chinese or Korean. They reported this to the Hummer corporal whose vehicle’s roof-mounted TOW radar was sweeping the snowy expanse for the tank that had disappeared, the corporal as well as Kegg and Melissa hypothesizing that the earlier squeaking noises they’d heard had been armor retreating from a defilade position beyond the wood.
“Should search them for intel,” Melissa Thomas said, trying not to grimace with her pain, but Kegg noticed anyway and, seeing her flak jacket perforated, asked, “You bleeding?”
“No. Just a bit of indigestion. That slug winded me.”
“Damn lucky it wasn’t higher,” the Hummer corporal said. “You’d have a tracheotomy you didn’t ask for.”
She grinned manfully, asking him again, “Should we check them for intel?” She knew it was paramount in this kind of operation, especially given the minefield. SATPIX had indicated temperature differential spots where earth had been disturbed, dug up, but snow covering the ground made it difficult to pinpoint the mines while you were being shot at.
The corporal had a lariat, formed with the rope from the Hummer’s front bumper. He tossed the loop over the dead Asian. “I’ll haul him over in case he’s lying on a ‘pine cone.’”
“I like that better,” said Kegg, who wanted no part of frisking anyone lying facedown.
“Let’s get out of here,” said the other marine, manning the front-door gun. “I’ve got dots on the radar. Big ones.”
“Second wave?” asked Kegg.
“Due north,” said the Hummer’s front-door gunner, doubling as radar nerd.
“So?” pressed Kegg. “What’s the problem?”
“Problem, marine,” cut in the marine corporal, “is that our second wave would be coming from the southeast, maybe due east, not out of the north.”
“Oh,” said a disappointed Kegg as the Hummer reversed, taking up the rope’s slack at the front, the door gunner enjoining his fellow marines quietly but urgently to get aboard as he watched the radar dots grow. “Let’s get going. If they’re voodoos, we’re too exposed.”
Melissa Thomas smiled for the first time since her chat on the Stallion with Freeman. “Exposed.” Maybe, she thought, in the sense they were out on the frozen expanse of marsh, but the snow was falling so heavily, visibility was now only twenty feet at best. That was as much a defense as a hindrance.
The snow-dotted body rolled over. The Hummer advanced and reversed twice more. There was no sign of a booby trap on either of the other two bodies; the three terrorists probably hadn’t time to do anything more than get off a few rounds in the direction of Melissa and Kegg before Kegg felled them.
As the marine corporal quickly recoiled the rope, Melissa, with a great effort and the stink of the Hummer’s diesel exhaust temporarily shutting down her nose, knelt down and started frisking the Asian while Kegg and the corporal who’d finished with the rope began searching the two Caucasian terrorists.
“Bingo!” said Melissa.
The corporal and Kegg turned toward her, the Hummer’s gunner repeatedly making a 360-degree sweep, urging them to hurry up. “Let’s go! I don’t like it.”
“What’ve we got, Thomas?” the corporal asked, watching her unrolling a scroll she’d found inside the Asian’s jacket.
“Some kind of map,” Melissa answered.
“C’mon, guys!” said the gunner.
Melissa flattened it out quickly. The map was the size of a man’s handkerchief. She and Kegg glanced at it, then she rapidly rolled it up, tucking it inside her helmet against the liner. “We’ll give it to Freeman. That SpecWar guy of his — the lieutenant—”
“Lee,” said the gunner. “Yeah, Lieutenant Lee. Hey, that tank’s gotta be ’round here somewhere.”
“Relax,” the corporal told him. “You see it on the radar?”
“No,” said the gunner, “but those fuckin’ bogeys are moving in.”
“Maybe they’re UFOs!” joshed the corporal.
“You a fucking comedian?”
“How many bogeys you got, Pete?”
“Looks like nine,” the gunner answered. “Three threes.”
“What was that?” the corporal asked Melissa as they walked to the Hummer. “The printing on that guy’s map? Arabic?”
“Korean, I think,” said Melissa. “Anyway, that Lee guy’s multilingual. He should know.” She looked back at Kegg. “Might know what ‘Ga ja!’ means too.”
“Maybe it’s his grocery list,” joked Kegg.
“For cryin’ out loud,” said the machine gunner, looking anxiously over the reeds and stealing a glance at the radar. “What the fuck’s going on with you guys? Let’s go!”
A nervous rifleman on the wood’s perimeter squeezed off a three-round burst before Freeman and Aussie saw the Hummer’s whip aerial and its TOW missile housing through the falling snow. The Hummer was hit “midships,” as described by the enraged corporal who had been driving, and who was now tearing the proverbial strip off a young marine whose first live fire in combat was to hit the Hummer. Freeman kept out of it. The marine’s humiliation was punishment enough. Besides, the general, more conscious than anyone in the wood of time slipping by and the twenty-four-hour deadline bearing down on him, turned his attention to the scroll found by Melissa Thomas on the dead Asian terrorist. As the general unrolled the scroll, saw the dotted lines and elaborately styled calligraphy, he realized that the map was more or less a duplicate of Ilya’s more roughly drawn sketch. But whereas Ilya had said the entrance to and the exit from the tunnels were the same, the dead Korean’s map, his nationality confirmed by Johnny Lee’s examination of the black-inked characters, showed an exit tunnel.
“The characters written here,” Lee told Freeman, “indicate it’s a tunnel wide enough for two men.”
“How does the exit tunnel connect up to the three tunnels?” asked Freeman. He was having trouble reading the drawing overlaid with characters. “Does it go up from the fifty-foot area Ilya mentioned?”
“Yes,” confirmed Lee.
“Not a trap is it, Johnny?” pressed Freeman, brushing big, sloppy flakes of snow off the map. “I mean that dead son of a bitch Kegg and Marine Thomas wasted violated every military code, carrying around detail like that. Could it be a plant? Sucker us in?” Memories of “AMERICANS SUCK” were lit large in the general’s mind.
“No,” Lee replied confidently. “I don’t think so.” He turned to Melissa Thomas. “Was this terrorist you got the map from in Russian fatigues?”
It was a crucial question, but neither Melissa, Kegg, nor the corporal could vouch for the answer. He’d been pretty well covered in snow, and the Hummer with the rope had turned him over several times, but — maybe the two Caucasians had been dressed a little differently from the Korean, but the truth was that in the confusion and speed of the firefight none of the three marines could be certain. They’d all been looking at the dead men’s faces when the Hummer’s rope turned them over.
“I’m not sure,” said Melissa. “I’m sorry, General.”
“No problem. You did well.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Melissa. “Why’s it important about how he was dressed? The Korean, I mean?”
The general glanced over at Ilya. “Because my friend Ilya here tells me there’ve been a lot of Koreans working up here. So if the Korean terrorist you marines took out was a civil engineer, not an army type who wouldn’t or shouldn’t carry maps of the system, that’d lend credence to this scroll you found. It’d make sense for an engineer, army or not, to have this with him. It’d be like our tac maps.” He meant the tactical maps Colonel Tibbet, himself, and selected company commanders had to have. The general paused and, as casually as he could, asked Johnny Lee, “Any date on it?” And he watched Ilya, whose eyes were avoiding the general’s with such ill-disguised purpose that Freeman became more convinced that Lee’s answer would be critical.
“Yep,” said Johnny Lee. “It’s got intended and completion dates marked near all the separate tunnel stuff.”
“Hmm,” murmured the general. While the others were looking down at the map, he was watching Ilya again. “Any date on the exit tunnel, Johnny?”
“Yep. It’s dated—” Johnny turned the map around, placing it on a stump under cover of the fir’s branches, using two H K 9 mm mags to weight it down. “His calligraphy’s ornate, flowery, but it’s not really very neat.”
They could all hear the first “wokka-wokka” and “whoop-whoop” noises of approaching helos. Russian or American, no one knew; radio silence was complete.
“It—” began Lieutenant Johnny Lee, “I mean the exit tunnel is marked as having been completed two months ago!”
“That a fact?” said Freeman urbanely, his left hand accommodating an itchy spot beneath his Fritz, his right returning his 9 mm to its holster. “Funny,” he continued, hearing the approaching din of aircraft, and looking up high through the fir’s snow-packed branches at the invisible racket thundering directly overhead. The heavy pulsing in the snow-thick air told every one of the first wave’s marines spread out higgledy-piggledy in the landing snafu that they were either being reinforced by Yorktown’s second wave or attacked by gunships.
Johnny Lee’s answer that the exit tunnel had been completed months ago was followed by such a cacophony from the helos that Freeman’s instruction to Ilya had to be delivered in his full command voice. “You were leading my men into a trap. We go in the entrance and your comrades — your comrades,” shouted Freeman, “would be in there, lights out, waiting for us. A trap, you cunning son of a bitch!”
“No, no, General,” pleaded Ilya. “I didn’t know. No—”
Freeman slung the AK-74 over his left arm, jabbing his finger at Ilya. “You told me, you terrorist son of a bitch, that there was no exit yet, that it wasn’t completed!”
Ilya’s eyes told the general he’d run out of excuses. He was asking for mercy, having prevaricated with just enough of the truth to set up the trap that would have annihilated the Americans. Suddenly Ilya lunged at Freeman, pulling the general’s KA-BAR, bringing the knife up with such speed that Freeman, putting his hand on the pistol’s grip, ready to draw, had only a split second to “up” the holster, the gun still in it, and fire, the parabellum round exiting the canvas holster and striking the Russian in the chest, punching him back. He fell, staggered to his feet, taking Freeman’s second shot in the throat. His carotid artery, punctured, gushed blood, giving Freeman time for the third shot, the 9 mm slug ending the business in a flurry of snow as the Russian fell back onto the fir’s snow-laden branches, his blood staining the clumps of virgin snow that suddenly cascaded down from the tree’s branches, a denuded branch, relieved of its burden, springing up, rising another foot or two above the ground.
Now, in addition to the headache-inducing din of the armada of helos, Freeman’s team and Chester’s marines could hear another sound, which Melissa Thomas and Kegg recognized as the loud, ripping noise of machine-gun fire. It was coming from the helos above, which were invisible except as blips on the Hummer’s radar, and identified as enemy craft by Freeman’s and Chester’s infrared friend-or-foe helmet patches. The Hummer’s helo-experienced corporal identified the craft as Black Shark Kamov 50 attack helos and Hind transporters.
The Black Sharks and Hind transports were arriving head-on with the second wave of Joint Strike Fighter — escorted Super Stallions. No one thought it was anything but a rather deliberate, tactical ploy by the air force general, Cherkashin.
“He’s a hard son of a bitch,” pronounced Kegg.
“Who?” asked the Hummer corporal. What the hell was Kegg on about? “Do you mean Freeman, or the son of a bitch who sent his choppers in to fuck up our second wave? Cher — what’s his name? Cherkov?”
“Cherkashin,” Kegg corrected him. “No, I mean Freeman’s the hard-ass. Shooting POWs like that.”
“POWs, my ass,” cut in Aussie. “They were friggin’ terrorists. They’d sell their sister for two bits. Fuckin’ mercenaries. All of ’em.”
“So?” interjected the corporal. “Who made you Pope?”
“Listen, Sonny,” Aussie shot back, “you would’ve had your sorry ass in a trap if Thomas here hadn’t found that map.”
“What makes you think we’re not in one now?” said Kegg. “Maybe the map’s a trap.”
“Hey,” put in the front-door gunner, “map’s a trap. That’s a rap.”
“They’ll wrap your ass if I’m right,” said Kegg.
The front-door gunner had no response, or if he did, he left it unsaid. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the claustrophobic throbbing in the sky.
Despite the danger presented to him by the presence of the enemy helos, as a soldier Freeman had to admire Cherkashin’s strategy. With many of the inferior Russian radars whited out by snow and therefore posing a high risk of blue on blue amongst the Russian helos, Cherkashin, like Rommel in the France of ’44, had clearly decided that he must engage the Americans — in the air, in this case — before they had a chance to land in force and link up with the first wave. Much of the surprise Cherkashin was creating with this helo attack was due to sheer luck in obtaining an “unofficial loan” of the elite helos from the Siberian Sixth Armored’s air wing located just east of Spassk-Dalni, fifteen miles east of the lake’s southeastern shore. In fact, the air battle now under way had begun north of the lake as the MEU’s second wave of Stallions tried an end run around the northwestern half of the lake, hoping to come up behind the Russians that the McCain’s SES had picked up even given the blizzard conditions over the lake. Cherkashin’s Black Shark helos, which NATO Commander Roger Hawkins had nicknamed “Werewolves,” had proved how good they were in tight turns of 3.5 Gs and dive speeds of 200 and more miles per hour with their 50T thermal imagers. The joint Russian-Israeli-built Erdogan version, with its pilot and copilot sitting in a NATO-weapons-compatible cockpit encased in 12.7 mm-proof armor plating and equipped with the world’s first operational helo rocket-assisted ejection system, was particularly deadly. One Super Stallion had already been shot down by an Erdogan’s rapid-firing 2A42 30 mm cannon, its pilot eschewing high-fragmentation rounds in favor of armor-piercing rounds. The gun’s virtuoso performance owed much to the shark-shaped helo having a coaxial rotor but no tail rotor, enabling it to perform a flat turn, its gun free to move through either an unrestricted vertical or horizontal circle as the Shark climbed and dived. With its two 2,200 horsepower, side-mounted turboshaft engines, the helo performed maneuvers that would have seemed impossible to an earlier generation of chopper pilots.
As Freeman often told his team, everything has its limitations, and the swarm of nine Black Sharks was no match for the four American vertical takeoff and landing Joint Strike Fighters led by McCain’s Chipper Armstrong. Each of the big 247-pound, 27 mm gas-operated revolver guns was so deadly that, slaved to the JSF’s avionics, it outshot the Black Sharks’ best in close air battle. And because the Americans’ radar was 87 percent more effective than that of the nine Black Sharks, the thirty American gunners in this second wave of fifteen Super Stallions were able to take their copilot’s voice feed directly from his heads-up radar display without any intermediate step, which gave them a two-to three-second advantage.
Johnny Lee, listening in to radio voices in the frantic chaos and urgency of the air battle, repeatedly heard the American helos being referred to as “Freeman’s Birds.”
“Shit,” said one of Chester’s marines, “they think you’re running the show, General.”
No one contradicted him, because now that Freeman had the map, it seemed as if he was certainly the man best informed to run the show, given that Tibbet was still preoccupied trying to gather in the disparate units of the first wave.
“Johnny—” Freeman began.
“Down!” shouted Gomez, who was kneeling beside Eddie Mervyn’s rigid body when they heard a swishing sound overhead, the heat generated by the flight of the missile creating a tumbling roll of warm air that swept the wood like a prairie Chinook, sending large plops of snow falling from tree and bush.
“That was close,” said the Hummer corporal. “I thought—” He was silenced by the Hummer’s gunner, who said he thought he’d heard the squeak of a tracked vehicle several seconds before, but had since lost all trace of it in the din of more than twenty-four helos diving, hovering, landing, and all of them seemingly firing at once. Some of the errant rounds ripped into the frozen marsh and reeds skirting the lake. Freeman now heard the second wave being put down only a mile and a quarter west of the ABC complex, as planned, but over a mile north of the first wave’s scattered troops. This meant Tibbet would lose valuable time, having to hustle if he was to have his second wave join the first.
What neither Tibbet nor Freeman knew was that by calling in every IOU they had, as well as offering U.S. currency bonuses on the spot, Mikhail Abramov, Viktor Beria, and Sergei Cherkashin had obtained an ad hoc force of 480 troops, which were being ferried in by four high-T-tailed Ilyushin-P transports, each of the planes’ four big D-30 KP engines controlled by updated computer avionics, so that landing on the relatively short ABC runway was virtually hands-off despite the snowfall.
In much the same way, for the first time in out-of-country operations, two of the Marine Expeditionary Unit’s JSFs, the first fighter piloted by McCain’s Chipper Armstrong, the other by Rhino Manowski, set down as instructed by Tibbet’s enciphered ground-to-air communication once radio silence had been broken in the Russian helo attack. While Armstrong’s JSF put down on a slab of frozen marsh by Freeman’s wood, Manowski landed his plane by another “wood island,” as it were, nearer Tibbet, who had now reached cover just outside the perimeter where a platoon of second-wave marines were coming under sustained rocket-propelled-grenade, heavy machine gun, and AK-47 fire. But in the whiteout, this enfilade from the unseen Russian defenders was more smoke than fire, with only a small percentage of the Russian infantry defenders having the use of IR scopes and sights, the weather forecasters having disappointed them as well as the Americans. Amid the cacophony of rotor slap and battle, Freeman was writing quickly on his knee pad, sketching out a plan of attack using Ilya’s map, gambling on his hunch that Ilya’s map of a route through the minefield would be accurate because it had clearly been Ilya’s intention to lure all of the Americans into the tunnel at one end and bottle them up in a killing zone.
“Johnny,” Freeman called out to Lee. “Encrypt this and send to Jack Tibbet: ‘ABC H-block—’”
“Hang on, General,” cut in Lee, uncharacteristic alarm in his voice. Freeman recognized it as Lee’s “computer down” tone, as Johnny’s ungloved hands tapped the foldout keypad again with the same results. “Nothing’s going through, sir. Like it’s frozen.”
“Maybe it is,” said Choir, his voice all but lost to a sudden surge of fighting all down the line.
“All right,” said Freeman, obviously annoyed but unfazed, writing quickly on his blood-spattered knee pad. “Johnny, try the encrypted function again.” Lee did, and it didn’t work. “We only have PL, General.”
“All right, dammit, plain language’ll have to do. Contact Tibbet’s HQ and explain about the tunnels’ approximate location. But obviously we can’t give him any tactical information and we haven’t much time. So while you’re messaging his HQ, Johnny, I’ll see what I can do — dig up a trick or two from the old days — in a follow-up PL message.”
In all his time with Douglas Freeman, Aussie had never seen the general’s hands move so fast — like a Vegas dealer’s — and within five minutes, during which time Lee was radioing Tibbet’s HQ, the general tore off a message sheet, telling Johnny, “Send the following.”
WYFWBAANGHARIUNNEOENOLTDDVONKMLHWME-
DYEMNIIRRLOEEOTPPDUUGBTEEEICROOHNTTD-
KEOTITHEGFCDHTRERAOETOEAMRMRIOFXNOOBUVGUIC
USLSEOSTETEEA.
The din of the battle soon reached an apogee, then dramatically fell off, the snow drifting, piling up, under a bone-freezing wind that was howling down from the Zapadnyy Siniy only a few miles to the west.
“Are we going in, General?” Aussie asked.
“No option,” pronounced Freeman firmly. “We attack.” He had one eye on Johnny Lee who, though the biting wind was freezing his hands, was forcing himself to focus so as not to screw up the burst message to Tibbet. Any pause by Johnny would count as a “space” in the train of letters; a missing 0 or 1 in a binary message would jumble the sequence and thus scramble the message.
“Signature?” Lee asked the general.
Freeman thought of his favorite president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “All we have to fear is fear itself. We’ll use FDR,” he told Lee.
Johnny was blowing on his fingers and flexing them. “Signature within or without, sir?” he asked Freeman.
“Within.”
“Very well. All set to—” They heard the unmistakable whoosh of a fuel air explosive, the FAE bomb sending an enormous flash of orange through the snow that immediately turned to steam then to sheets of filigreed ice that cracked on the frozen marsh like shattered glass.
“All set to send burst transmission,” Lee informed Freeman.
“Send.”
“It’s gone, sir,” said Johnny, but he looked worried. Any transmission was easy to intercept. Cracking the code?
“Listen up!” Freeman told his fellow soldiers. “We’ve got the best outfit possible here, my team, a Hummer with four TOWs loaded and four in the rack, and a fire team par excellence, with Terrible Thomas and Killer Kegg.” There was a snort of laughter.
“What more could we ask for?” continued Freeman. “Soon as I get acknowledgment of this message, we find our way back to where Eddie got it, but we keep strictly this side of the GPS mine line. The snow will’ve buried any sign of booby traps, so even with this map showing where the exit from the three tunnels is we’re going to have to move slowly till we find the exit door. From the terrorist’s map, the door is like one of those used on an old house’s coal chute. The exit itself appears to be a steeply graded stairwell about eighty feet or more long, and it’s barely wide enough, if Johnny’s interpretation of this map is correct, for two men abreast.” He paused. “Though in this damn refrigerator I wouldn’t mind being next to a breast myself.”
“Hoo ha!” came the marine reply. Melissa Thomas’s smile was tired and patient, the smile of a woman who had heard much more gauche comments from grown-up boys.
Freeman became serious again. “This isn’t going to be a cakewalk but I’m confident we’ll be able to reach that exit door if this map is right, and remember the approach to it won’t be mined, otherwise it wouldn’t be a damned exit! Questions?”
Aussie asked about the entrance to the tunnel. If Freeman attacked the exit, wouldn’t ABC’s technicians be able to escape back out the entrance?
“Doesn’t matter if they do,” replied Freeman. “Right now we’re after the machinery more than the men.” He paused, checking that everyone was ready. “Right,” he said, “check your weapons. Remember, condoms on the barrels so snow doesn’t get up the spout and freeze the rifling. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
With the chaotic roar of the helos fading as quickly as it had begun, Freeman’s force moved off in the relative silence, broken here and there only by sporadic “blind man’s firing,” as Freeman called it. A hundred yards out, the marine corporal, sitting in the Hummer, could have sworn he heard a squeaking sound. He also knew hearing it was like watching clouds; you often see the image that the mind projects, and sometimes you hear noises that aren’t there, sounds born of imagination and the circumstances of the kind the corporal was encountering now in the conditions of war with the Russian terrorists, of whom he’d seen very few, except for those in the ill-fated BTR and the truck, wanting to kill every American they could find. The damp air all around was thick with the pungent smell of burning gasoline and high-explosive fumes rising slowly from those places in the minefield moat where more than forty Americans, their transport Stallion thrown off course by the Black Sharks, had perished as it hit the ground, its huge rotors cartwheeling and breaking up, the fuselage suddenly bursting into flame.