In the three SAS transports high above the cloud cover, the red “get ready” light came on.
“Stand up!” ordered the jump masters. “Secure oxygen masks. Adjust IR.”
Even without the infrared goggles, the troops could see flashes of light, not from the storm, which they were now well clear of, but from the man-made storm of antiaircraft missile and gunfire opening up on the lower-level diversionary F-111— fighter bomber — attack that was under way on the Likhachev Works and the factories beyond. Over Moscow itself, a rain of Allied propaganda leaflets drifted down with the flakes of snow, the people rushing out of their homes, occasionally risking the wrath of the upolnomochenny vozdushnoy okhrany— “air raid blackout wardens”—in order to collect the propaganda leaflets. These were prized by the civilian population, whose shortage of toilet paper was the most acute in years — so much so that children fought over the leaflets, not only for their families but in order to sell the letter-sized leaflets for several kopecks, many customers preferring the smooth, albeit print-covered, surface of the leaflets to the coarse nazhdachnaya bumaga—”sandpaper”—of the severely rationed Soviet-issue toilet paper.
In the cockpit of the lead transport carrying Laylor’s Troop A, the navigator was watching the flicking green bar lines of his computer square moving closer together over the approaching drop zone. He pushed the magnifier button and the lines spread out again to the periphery of the screen. The square looked much larger now but was in fact covering the smaller area of the drop zone and taking into account wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity in order to allow the troops the best possible chance of landing, not simply in the drop zone of the Kremlin’s sixty-three acres but within the bull’s-eye of the thirty-acre triangle that formed the northernmost corner.
On the left-hand side of the infrared screen, the copilot could see the long, brutish outline of the arsenal across from the COM, the Council of Ministers, on the eastern — right-hand— side of the screen. The partially treed and opened section, in between them, the designated drop zone. To the south lay the spires of Assumption Cathedral, the Kremlin Palace, and the Moscow River a quarter mile farther south.
In the cockpit the navigator saw the infrared square screen closing on the rough triangular shape. “Now,” he said. The pilot acknowledged and behind the flight deck the red light went to green and the eighty SAS troopers fell, black starfish into the night.
For all their practice, the blast of freezing air always came as a shock, the cold hitting their faces with the force of a blow, screaming about their oxygen masks, infrared goggles, and huge backpacks like a wild banshee, each man seeing the others in his troop clearly as white shapes moving against the gray smear of cloud cover ten thousand feet below, as clearly as they spotted the Ping-Pong-ball-sized blots of whitish light to the southeast as reddish-orange bomb blasts ran in strings of explosions, their sound unheard until several seconds later.
The odds were only one in over four million, but a trooper in David Brentwood’s stick of twenty, struck in the chest by either a stray machine gun bullet or shrapnel from the air battle miles away, went limp, going into a tumble. Through Brentwood’s infrared goggles, the blood sucked out of the dead trooper looked like the spiraling vortex of a tornado. Then the wounded man’s weapon load, probably the nine-millimeter shorts, began popping off.
David knew the sound wouldn’t be heard, as they were still too high, but if the man’s automatic altimeter-release chute controls were damaged, the chute wouldn’t snap open at four thousand feet and the man would hit the ground before any of the remaining fifty-nine troopers. David “humped” his back and went into a right-hand downward slide to catch up with him. It was a move sky divers used to form hand-holding circles, but not under the weight of a 110-plus-pound pack, and with the hard buffeting of the Arctic-born air further increased by the corrugated-road like concussions of air caused by the multiple ack-ack explosions away to the southeast.
David saw a white blur through his infrared goggles — another trooper moving in from the other side toward the tumbling man. The white infrared blur was broken by a black patch that David recognized was the bump of the man’s colder backpack. Now, at fifteen thousand, both men closing in on him, the wounded man’s body kept plummeting, uncontrolled, when, in a move that David right there and then knew was one of the neatest he’d ever seen, the other trooper closed against the tumbling man’s body and they became one. The next moment David Brentwood was below them, having overshot, the trooper releasing the wounded man’s emergency chute, still clinging to him. David Brentwood was swearing, the mumbled words resounding back at him inside his oxygen mask. The drill wasn’t for the trooper to pull the man’s chute but to stay with him until the four-thousand-foot level, for while there was lots of cloud cover, one chute opening before they all got to four thousand could be a sixty-second giveaway if the big chute was accidentally caught in one of the periodic searchlight sweeps from the city, the beams crisscrossing, bunching, and crisscrossing again, like enormous bunches of white celery, off to the southeast. Thank God, thought David, they would have good cloud cover to six thousand, below which the last weather report said it would be clear.
But now, falling at over 130 feet a second, a glance at his wrist altimeter telling him he was at twelve thousand, with just under eight thousand — fifty-nine seconds — to go before all chutes would be pulled, David saw the would-be rescuer desperately trying to cut himself out of the tangle, but now falling out of starfish pattern and tumbling himself, dangling by one foot from a maze of twisted nylon. Two seconds later, David saw the wounded man’s chute “thin” to a Roman candle and lost sight of both of them. Suddenly, frighteningly, everything was black. He had a sensation of hurtling into the stark vortex of some gigantic wind tunnel, his face mask hissing under the onslaught of granular snow, stinging his face and drumming off the IR goggles like hail on a metal roof.
Looking down for the blobs of infrared heat emission they said he should see coming up from the drop zone — particularly from the two domes on the Council of Ministers Building, the smaller one on the western side, the larger on the eastern — he saw nothing. Then suddenly, bursting out of the snow cloud, he could see the two blurred orbs and other traces of heat emission from the roofs of the Kremlin complex, though from the fuzz veiling the infrared, he could tell it was still snowing. On one hand, it would make spot-on landing difficult, even given the relatively large area between the buildings. On the other hand, the snowfall would soften the impact. The real key, however, was whether the SPETS guards would have any forewarning.
He glanced at the altimeter needle, saw it was forty-two hundred feet, a gust of wind pushing him hard left. Quickly he corrected, going into a right-hand drop, and before he was ready for it, he heard the whiplike crack of the chute opening above him, the sudden deceleration, so that now his descent seemed to be taking forever — and he felt that the whole of Moscow must be able to see them — all about him the white blurs of starfish flipping, changing into men. There was another crack, then another — a trooper so close to him that he had thought for a second it was the crack of rifle fire. He had no idea who the two men were who had gone down in the tumble. All he could hope was that the trooper who’d gone to help had freed himself from the chute foul-up and that the other had plummeted to earth either in the trees southward in the Taynitsky Garden or into the river itself — well away from the drop zone.
In fact, both men had come down in Red Square just to the north of St. Basil’s, not far from the red-star-topped Spasskaya, or Savior’s Gate. One of the two gate guards, hearing a snow-soft thud, moved forward, but unable to see very far in the falling snow and forbidden to leave his post, he rang for two other guards in the warming room beneath the gate’s barbican to go and investigate, suspecting it might be a piece of equipment from the snowplow now working the square. The plow’s half-slit yellow headlights were barely visible in the blackout as it worked to keep the square as clear as possible for the members of the Politburo and STAVKA for when they left the emergency meeting now under way in Premier Suzlov’s office. The plow also had to keep the square clear for the twenty or so T-90 tanks parked in the lot behind the corner arsenal tower, should they ever be needed quickly in the square — loose, unpacked snow particularly annoying to the machine gunners, who, unlike the main gunner, did not have laser sights.
A minute later, one of the investigating guards pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘ Parashyutisty!”—”Paratroops!”—he yelled. “Parashyutisty protivnika!”—”Enemy paratroops!” The guards at the Spasskaya Gate alerted the KGB guards officer and the commander of the arsenal SPETS troops. Thirty seconds later, 345 men were pouring out of their barracks within the arsenal, quickly donning winter battle smocks, snatching arms from the racks, the general alarm whooping at all gates, all entrances and exits to the Fortress closing — SAS already landing in the area between the arsenal on the western side and the COM, a half dozen or so running forward from the old Tsar Apartments five hundred yards south, the snow roiling in beams of searchlights that began crisscrossing the sixty-three acres like enormous headlight beams sharply defined in the frozen, snow-thick air.
David Brentwood’s MAC 11 was already spitting flame as he, with six other troopers, who he could see were also firing, came down in the large open area between the Council of Ministers on his right and the Church of the Twelve Apostles to the south. Suddenly his face was smacked violently to the left — there was a ripping, tearing sound on his mask, a flurry of some enormous bird, its talons into his neck as he hit the ground. Before he had time to realize it had been one of the Kremlin’s goshawks, he heard a tinkle of broken glass somewhere behind him. A searchlight died. Next there was a stuttering burst of AK-47 fire, and David saw two of his troop, snow flicking up about, dead, but not before the SAS troopers from A Troop, landing on the broad, flat section of roof on the Palace of Congress, had killed four SPETS as the Russians emerged from the southern end of the arsenal, trying to make it to the trees in front of the COM. Another SPETS was shot, mistaken by a plainclothes KGB for one of the attacking Allied force.
But if the SPETS had moved fast and were in action within seconds, as became their elite status, then so had the SAS — all expertly trained, in Olympian condition, and superbly practiced in what to do and above all how to adapt with ingenuity as well as rapidity when confronted by a plan that David Brentwood recognized was off to a bad start. The SPETS had begun engaging them, albeit in poor visibility, before a good many of the SAS were even out of harness. But against losing the edge of complete surprise, Brentwood knew his men’s adrenaline was up and racing in a way that that of men, however good, just hauled out of bed could not be.
“Zdes!”—”Over here!”—called Aussie in one of the Russian phrases. “Zdes!” he repeated to three SPETS making heavy going of it near a wind drift of snow as they cleared the end of the park between the arsenal and the COM, Aussie pumping his forearm in the Russian infantry signal for “hurry up.” Hesitating for only a second, they turned toward him. When they were seven yards from the Australian, a flare changed night into day, but it was too late. In two quick bursts, Lewis felled them. Crouching low, running for the COM door and calling out to three members of Laylor’s A Group and Choir Williams, like himself from B Group, to cover him, Lewis quickly pushed three balls of Play-Doh plastique from his left pouch against the lock of the big door, the ten-second-delay detonator-firing unit inserted like a small matchbox in putty. The searchlights were nearly all out now, easy targets for SAS men, especially those on the Palace of Congress roof.
“Clear!” called Aussie. Choir Williams and the three men from Laylor’s group moved quickly to the protection of alcoves on either side of the door. Now there was a veritable rain of parachute flares fired by the Russians, brilliantly illuminating the yellow sides of the COM building, the trees fifty yards or so in front of them, and beyond, the roof of the arsenal, where a parachute had wrapped itself around a chimney, the SAS trooper crouched behind the chimney, raking the trees below. The dull thump of the plastique was followed by a tremendous crash as one of the doors buckled, its falling weight ripping out its hinges as it slid down the marble stairs into the snow, black, acrid-smelling smoke pouring out of the building, rising quickly, billowing into the snowy air like some abandoned locomotive, the echoing sound of AK-47 fire erupting from inside the building. Another two SAS men, using the explosion as cover, were sprinting through the knee-deep powder now, one of them David Brentwood, who, without so much as breaking his stride, went through the snow-curtained smoke, returning fire, shooting down the two guards, not SPETS, he noticed, who had been blasting away at the door with more panic than accuracy. Probably KGB auxiliaries.
Aussie had started to move into the building with Brentwood, but seeing a rush of six or seven SPETS, and these were not auxiliaries, dashing from the trees, he had stayed to provide covering fire for three men from Laylor’s troop who were setting up the 5.56 light machine gun, which quickly cut down two of the SPETS, three more hitting the ground behind them, another two still charging full bore when Aussie brought one of them down in the final burst of his magazine. Choir Williams felled the remaining SPETS, or at least the one still advancing as Aussie, kneeling by the fallen door, quickly slipped another magazine into the MAC’s handle housing.
“Hey!” It was Brentwood signaling him and Choir. “No time to play in the snow, Aussie. Let’s go!”
“Cheeky bastard!” mumbled Aussie, covering Brentwood’s left flank, Choir Williams on the right, the three of them now in the foyer, the echoing bootsteps behind them those of Thelman and Schwarzenegger. Wordlessly, with no time to be relieved at having found only two men, and these obviously not SPETS, in the foyer, the five SAS men, Brentwood leading, began heading up the red-carpeted stairway as another half dozen or so SAS, some of these Cheek-Dawson’s C Group, entered the foyer, quickly pairing off with the other three members in each of their SAS modules, several of them in Brentwood’s troop down to three-man modules already, not counting the two he’d lost in the tumble drop. There was a firecracker tempo to the increased firing that was now coming from outside among the trees across from the COM, fire returned by Laylor’s light machine-gun crews and other members of Cheek-Dawson’s sapper troop, the air outside COM’s ground floor zinging with marble chips knocked off by the small-arms fire.
Most of the SAS had now taken off their IR goggles, not so much because they were a dead giveaway for any SPETS who got close enough to see them through the almost zero visibility of the falling snow but rather because, while they indubitably conferred an advantage during the landing and had cost twenty-three SPETS their lives before they got more than ten feet beyond the arsenal entrance, the peripheral vision of the goggles was a hindrance on the ground and indeed could reflect and so draw fire beneath the intensely bright light of the flares.
“Sapper mod!” called out David.
“Here!” came an answer. “But there’re only two of us, Lieutenant.”
“Never mind,” said David. “Do it!”
Within two minutes they had found the COM’s main switchboard. Seven seconds later, the entire building was in darkness. David heard the whine of an elevator stopping abruptly. Outside, SPETS fire was increasing. In a way, it was reassuring — the T-90s had not yet entered the complex, the Russian commandos no doubt confident that three SPETS companies could easily deal with the SAS. Besides which, the tanks, whose brutish shapes David had glimpsed before touching down, couldn’t do much at the moment — any cannon fire into the east wing as likely to kill Suzlov and his war cabinet as the SAS.
Moving quickly but cautiously up the staircase, David could smell the surprisingly heavy, musty smell of the huge Old World building, and for some inexplicable reason, it gave him a surge of confidence as he, Aussie, Thelman, Schwarzenegger, and Choir Williams moved from the second-floor level toward the third-floor staircase without opposition, the ubiquitous four-globed chandeliers along the hallways lifeless now, the main switchboard had been taken out in the same power cutoff that would prevent the war council from using the elevators. Some chandeliers began to shake, their crystals casting crazy-patterned shadows in the dim, brooding light of the emergency battery packs that had come on at the end of each of the long, narrow, red-carpeted hallways. David’s target, which he could see clearly in his mind’s eye, was on the third floor of the east wing. There, another hallway leading from the wing’s hub would take him to Suzlov’s office to the meeting where, as Allied intelligence told them, the decision would be made that could lead to a chemical/nuclear holocaust not only for NATO’s forces but for all its noncombatants as well.
Brentwood glimpsed other SAS, a dozen or so, from Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop totally ignoring Brentwood’s troopers as they quickly went about their business, three men in each SAS module hurrying to place their charges on the Irish “J” beams and other supports, the fourth member of each module providing covering fire. The detonators were set for twenty minutes.
Outside, they could hear the chattering of an M-60 7.62-millimeter machine gun from one of Laylor’s A Troop mobile fire parties who were holding off the SPETS while Brentwood’s B Troop and Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop kept moving up the COM stairwell. David heard a series of steady muffled thumps in the background: two of the SAS’s lightweight 60.7-millimeter Esperanza commando mortars, which, as well as laying down several 1.43-kilogram smoke rounds in and about the arsenal, were also firing 1.4-kilogram high-explosive bombs with a fifty-meter damage radius. It was one slight edge that the SAS enjoyed, the SPETS understandably unwilling to lay mortar fire on their bosses in the COM.
Approaching the third floor, Schwarzenegger, Aussie Lewis, Thelman, and Choir Williams behind him, David heard the scream of an SAS man hit somewhere behind them, but not for one second did David look back. Suzlov’s office was all he cared about — number six on the right side of the third floor’s east wing, the mockup in the Hereford house as vivid to him as the first time they’d run through it. It was a long room, four or five times the size of a Western executive’s office, with a highly polished light wooden floor, dark wood desk, and grape-red Persian carpets. To the right of the desk and its neat row of four ivory phones there would be high, scalloped and ruffled white curtains. Behind the desk, a Communist flag and a fifteen-foot-high beige panel between the window and the far door — a door that might connect to the next room. And above the door he would see the burnished brass emblem of the Soviet Union and, though it should be out by now, a large, multifaceted chandelier below which Suzlov and his “merry band,” as Cheek-Dawson was wont to call them, would now be clustered behind elements of the elite guard, on station during Politburo/STAVKA meetings.
David heard a bumping, like a heavy ball, somewhere on the stairs above him. “Grenade!” he shouted, dropping to the stairs, firing the MAC into the darkness, the grenade’s explosion a crimson flash, its shrapnel taking out a window and zinging against the high walls. In the light of the grenade he saw two figures above him and fired. They both dropped. His group, having paused for only a split second, was virtually untouched by the grenade as it bumped past them, exploding on the second-floor level.
At the top of the stairs David saw one of the four-bulb chandeliers reflecting light from an emergency battery lantern. He gave the lantern a burst and there was no light. He knelt to put in another clip — suddenly a door flew open along the hallway. David flattened, Thelman shot dead, taking the full impact of the SPETS’ burst, which now stopped, snuffed out by Aussie’s return fire. Schwarzenegger bent down by Thelman.
“Leave him!” shouted Brentwood. “Keep moving.” He waved Aussie, Schwarzenegger, Choir, and another man, from B Group, forward. From outside came the approaching rotor slap of a Hind chopper, either bringing in reinforcements or possibly trying for a rooftop evacuation of Suzlov and his crew. The fire from the SPETS told Brentwood he wouldn’t have time to play safe and clean out each room, but that they’d have to run a possible gauntlet straight through Suzlov’s office. He was also wondering whether Laylor’s troop had managed to fight off the determined SPETS attempt to break through the cordon of fire with which Laylor had secured the COM’s northern entrance.
There was an enormous explosion, a shattering of glass, and a gust of desert-hot air, the Hind E disintegrating above the COM, sending down a golden liquid rain of gasoline and huge charred segments of what had been the chopper’s engines falling down the side of the building, Laylor’s M-60 machine guns now in a steady rip, their gunners using the light of the burning chopper to better rake the shapes that tried to make it from the old cannons and trees that flanked the arsenal across from the COM in what was now knee-high snow.
“Watch for more grenades!” Brentwood cautioned as his party split either side of the corridor that led to Suzlov’s office about sixty feet away. The cacophony of sound was so deafening outside as Laylor’s fire teams kept changing their position and the SPETS counteroffensive grew that Brentwood had to shout to be heard as he prepared them for the rush. Quite suddenly he realized he hadn’t had time to be frightened.
Because of the noise, he didn’t hear the sound of the opening door, second down on the left, but the light from the chopper lit up the SPETS the moment he’d opened the door to get his line of fire. Schwarzenegger’s burst literally punched the Russian back into the room. They heard a high, terrified “Please!” and saw some kind of cloth being waved from the second office, and then, hands high above them, one woman in uniform, the other a civilian in a yellow dress, came scuttling out. David cursed, ordered Aussie and Williams to frisk and “tape” them. It was thirty seconds lost, but for a fraction of a second in that time, Brentwood’s action delineated the fundamental difference between the two elite forces joined in battle. It was a microcosm, he realized, of what they were fighting about— about how the trainload of nurses and women like Lili and wounded men would be treated by one country as opposed to another. God knew the SAS were no angels, but David knew from bitter experience that a SPETS team would have simply blown the two women away.
He glanced at his watch. They had been in the COM seven minutes. They’d have to be out in another fifteen minutes, allowing three minutes at least to get well clear of the massive building before C Troop’s charges blew. But there was no point in the building coming down until they could confirm that Suzlov and friends had been dealt with.
“Suzlov’s office,” he reminded the group, “sixth on the right.” Suddenly the silence of the building was deafening, and for a moment all he could hear was the ringing in his ears caused by the fierce battle still raging outside, and through one of the shattered west windows he glimpsed small, dark figures of SAS men, four or five of them, who had landed on the Palace of Congress, three still pouring down deadly fire into the arsenal, one crumpled, writhing in the snow. To his right, David could hear the creaking of tanks in Red Square beyond the Kremlin’s east wall as more man twenty or so T-90s positioned their 135-millimeter cannons and 12.70 machine guns for the maximum enfilade of fire, all the way from the Historical Museum at the top of the square down past St. Nicholas’s Tower Gate to the island that was St. Basil’s outside the walls, the variegated hues of the church’s onion domes flickering in the light of the SPETS’ flares. No doubt the entire Kremlin was surrounded now by armor. The cannons had laser-guided fire control, but aiming, David knew, would hardly be a problem for the Russian gunners. It would all be point-blank. If a 135-millimeter hit you, as Aussie had once told Williams in a cheery aside, there’d be nothing left to identify, the hydraulic punch and superheated shell exploding blood and bone, in effect cremating you on the spot.
As Schwarzenegger quickly finished frisking and taping the two women, the other man from Troop B joined him in covering Brentwood, who was now moving along the right wall of the corridor, quickly ducking across into what had been the office of the two secretaries to make sure it was clear before moving farther down the hall. As he did so, Schwarzenegger pushed the two secretaries back inside the office and moved ahead of Brentwood, taking the left-hand side of the hallway, followed by the new man from Troop B, with Choir Williams behind.
Williams, taking up the rear, could hear a squeaky sound, like unoiled carts. It was the sound of more tanks wheeling into position in the vast square. Choir realized that refusing to take up Aussie’s bet about how many SAS would get out after the mission had probably been one of the better decisions of his life. Not that he’d get to spend what he’d saved.
David glanced back, seeing that Schwarzenegger, the new man from B Troop, and Williams were right behind him.
“Fritz,” he whispered, motioning to the new man and Williams behind, “you three go forward. Aussie and I’ll take rooms three and four, with you covering from halfway down.” He indicated the two offices on the right, which, unlike the two on the left, still had their doors shut and so were unknown quantities. “Everybody joins for the party at number six. Got it? No grenades until six. Don’t waste time on the doors. Automatic fire. Keep ‘em or kill them inside. We haven’t got time for housecleaning. Aussie and I’ll zip open six. You two as backup. Ready?”
“Ja,” said Schwarzenegger, he and the new man moving forward, Williams as tail gun Charlie. Making no attempt on three and four until they had covered Schwarzenegger and Co.’s advance along the left side, Brentwood and Aussie waited till Schwarzenegger was halfway down, away from any direct line of fire from the two closed offices, before they opened up with angle fire, their nine-millimeters chopping through the Party’s utilitarian plywood doors that had been used to segment the older, huger rooms of the tsar. Schwarzenegger and Williams were already “renovating” the third office on the left, just to make sure, but no one was in it. Coming out as quickly as they’d gone in, Schwarzenegger, the B trooper, and Williams moved farther down the hallway.
The explosion was like a whoof of gasoline, the hallway engulfed in smoke, Schwarzenegger’s legs hitting the roof, falling amid the debris, the blood from his severed thighs spurting from them like hoses, the smell of his burned flesh mixing with the stringent afterfumes of the Astrolite, the liquid mine which, sprayed onto the ground or in this case on the red hall carpet, had been detonated by foot pressure. Schwarzenegger was still alive, barely — a grotesque dwarf slithering in his own blood and intestines that were oozing out of him. The moment the Astrolite — a mine of American invention which the SAS did not know the Russians possessed — had exploded, the door of the office before number six was flung open. Three SPETS, so big they completely blocked the hallway, stepped out and fired. But Aussie, with the long SAS hours of “nondistraction” training, had resisted the natural temptation to immediately look down at his wounded comrades and instead had gone for the target with a full burst — its backwash searing the hairs on his hands — the burst cutting down the three SPETS. The man who had been immediately behind Schwarzenegger, miraculously saved from the blast because of Schwarzenegger’s taking the full impact of the mine, was now reeling back, already dead from one of the Russians’ shots, the bullet having passed clean through him, clipping Choir Williams on the shoulder.
“Into the rooms!” Brentwood yelled back to Aussie as he fired a long burst to dissuade any more SPETS from coming out of number six as a blur of two or three of Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop, having come up from the second level, now joined Lewis and Williams in the last office before number six.
“Bloody carpet was mined,” David heard the Australian yelling out at more members of Troop C who were now reaching them from the second floor and about to run down the hallway. “Stay where you are!” Aussie warned. “Fucking carpet’s pressure-triggered.”
His MAC in his right hand as he backed into the cleaned-out office now occupied by the Australian, Choir Williams, and the other men from Troop C, David, not putting down the MAC for a second and still watching the hall, reached across with his left hand, pulled out his Browning pistol from its holster, and shot what remained of Schwarzenegger through the heart.
“Let’s go for six!” shouted Aussie. “One or two of us’ll—”
“Negative!” said Brentwood. In Pyongyang some of Freeman’s troops had found connecting doors between several of the offices in Mansudae Hall, and the NKA regulars had used the connecting doors to backtrack through the offices and bushwhack Americans in the hallways from behind. David decided that, given the short time remaining and the further delay any Astrolite explosion would cause, there was only one way — but he had to raise his voice loud enough to be heard over the battery fire alarms that were now screaming all through the hallway, their beams boiling with toxic smoke. Suddenly another fire alarm started screaming above them in the office. “Fish is done!” said Aussie — but no one laughed, all of them knowing they only had at most five minutes to do the job and get out of COM — one man, visibly in shock, shaking violently, unable to look at Schwarzenegger’s remains.
“All right!” said David. “We haven’t got time for musical chairs. C troopers — plastique! On the far wall — five of diamonds. If we start taking fire through the wall, hit the deck. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right! Go!” By this time, several more troopers from C Group had entered the room.
“Fucking traffic jam,” said Aussie grimly.
“Ten-second delay!” David called out to the sappers, placing the charges in a three-foot square, the fifth lump of plastique in the middle, the detonator wires connecting. The sappers turned, signaling to one of their colleagues, who ran forward with another khaki vest load.
“Feels like brick,” the sapper nearest the wall said quietly, quickly packing double the amount of plastique into the square.
“Blow us into the fucking river!” said Aussie, standing next to Brentwood ten feet back from the wall, their MACs at the ready, the newly arrived troopers from Group C making a line of seven SAS ready to charge through to number six the moment the wall blew — if it did.
“How many in all?” asked one of the troopers. “Besides Suzlov, I mean.”
“Twenty-nine,” said Brentwood. “Don’t sweat it. There’ll be plenty of targets.”
“Plus SPETS,” added Aussie. “They’re the pricks I want.”
“Calm down,” Brentwood cautioned him. “Can’t help ‘em now, Aussie.”
The Australian said nothing, knowing that Brentwood meant Schwarzenegger, Thelma, and the others with whom they’d shared the indissoluble bonds of the SAS.
“All set!” announced the corporal who’d directed setting the charges.
“Behind the desk!” ordered Brentwood, but there was no need. The long desk of dark, highly polished hardwood that reflected the flares streaking up from the tank columns outside was over on its side in seconds, the SAS men down behind it, chin straps undone lest the concussion lift their Kevlar helmets.
“On safety!” ordered Brentwood — a precautionary order against accidental discharge from weapons hit by falling debris. “Aussie, you—”
The room blurred, the sound like a cracking iceberg, an avalanche of plaster falling on them, the snap of one man’s collarbone distinctly heard, followed by the shattering of the long room’s chandelier, its fragments lacerating the portraits of Lenin, the Politburo, and KGB chief Chernko into thousands of pieces.
“Go!” shouted Brentwood, and within seconds after the blast, the line of seven SAS moved into the choking fog of dust, MACs erupting in an enfilade of orange-tongued fire, none of them knowing whether the wall had in fact been penetrated but taking no chances. As they ceased firing, their bodies still tense as compressed springs, they moved forward over the rubble.
Brentwood had prayed that a hole at least the size of the three-foot-wide pattern would allow them an attack point. In fact, almost the entire brick wall had disappeared, a great gaping hole appearing in the eerie light afforded by the burning Soviet flag behind the desk, a pile of rubble looking like the steaming remains of an earthquake. Then David Brentwood saw three shadows, a sparkle of light — the fire from AK-47s — before them. It was a brave attempt, but the three SPETS, with the loss of one of the C troopers, were dissected by the hail of SAS bullets. Then quite suddenly all was deathly quiet, except for the low moans of the SAS trooper whose broken collarbone made it impossible for him to move, two other troopers coming into the room, dragging him out after one of them had given him a shot of morphine in order to get him downstairs and out of the building as soon as possible.
For a reason no one could explain, the room’s fire alarm was still screaming, though its light had gone out. Lewis reversed his Ingram, using the butt to silence it.
“Flashlight!” ordered Brentwood. “Two of you by the door — what’s left of it.”
“Struth!” said Aussie. “The bastards!”
“They’re gone!” said one of the troopers, looking around disbelievingly at the rubble. Brentwood, blinking hard, eyes gritty with dust, spotted a shoe by itself over near the desk. Behind the desk, its dark teak split asunder by the explosion, he saw a man whose face and eyebrows were plaster-white, dead, eyes staring heavenward, a neat bullet hole mid-forehead, only a faint trickle of purplish blood made dark by the dust congealed on the lapel of his suit, where the blood had dripped from his chin. But no more bodies were found in the rubble.
“Who is it?” asked one of the troopers. “Suzlov?”
“Yes,” answered David. “It’s him.”
“We’ve got three minutes,” said the sapper corporal, his voice devoid of panic but insistent. “We’d better move, Lieutenant.”
“Where the fuck to?” asked another, glancing out at all the tanks.
“All right,” said David. “Red-green flares, Aussie. Out the west window over there. And watch the carpet.” The red-green sequence would be the signal for the SAS troops to don the SPETS overlays and withdraw as best they might.
Aussie took his “Popsicle,” so called because the red and green self-propelled signal flares were no bigger than two frozen juice sticks. As he clipped a new magazine into the grip housing of his MAC, the flare pack in his left hand, and moved toward one of the COM’s west windows, one of the troopers covered him, shining the flashlight low, its beam a few inches above the carpet so they could see any indication of an Astrolite patch.
A few more men from C Troop now passed through the hole that only a minute or so before had been a solid brick wall, one of them Cheek-Dawson, with a tourniqueted bloody left arm in a strap sling, his Kevlar helmet split down the left side, and a hemorrhaging leg wound. “Come on, Lieutenant,” he told Brentwood. “Time to go.”
Brentwood was bending down, making absolutely sure, for the record, that Suzlov was dead, feeling for the slightest trace of a carotid pulse. “He’s cold,” he said.
“Let’s go!” echoed another trooper nearby, as the Australian, crossing the carpeted hallway in two steps worthy of a danseur, made his way to the west window and fired the flares.
“Everybody out of the building!” ordered David. “Assumption Cathedral. Now!”
In less than a minute, even the wounded Cheek-Dawson had reached the ground floor, the order to “clear out” shouted and repeated down the stairwells.
As they hit the cold, dark air, the snow now falling more heavily, they glimpsed dark humps of bodies in the light of the SPETS’ flares, some half-buried in the snowdrifts by the trees to their right, as they headed south for the short, desperate run to the cathedral near where several goshawks lay dead, having been caught in the crossfire.
“Where’s Laylor?” asked David as the fourteen men — all that remained of his and Cheek-Dawson’s forty troopers— headed for the Assumption’s golden domes, which, capped with snow, formed a perfect symmetry.
“On his way,” said one of the troopers.
As they ran, David suddenly called out to Cheek-Dawson, “Suzlov was cold.”
“What the devil are you on about?”
“Stone bloody cold!” shouted David, adopting the Englishman’s swear word to drive home the message, his own voice drowning now beneath the rattle of a machine gun opening up from the top floor of the arsenal two hundred yards behind them, red tracer arcing gracefully through the blizzard, kicking up snow about them.
“He wasn’t killed by us,” David explained. “They murdered him!”
Cheek-Dawson stumbled. David grabbed the Englishman’s collar, propelling him forward toward the steps of the holy refuge. Cheek-Dawson was trying to fit it all together, but nothing would fit. With his arm hurting so badly, near to the point of him blacking out, only sheer will kept him going, that and Brentwood, who, he thought, must be as addled as he himself was from the unbelievable noise and shock of the short, fierce battle and now the thundering roar of the COM collapsing. All he could think of was that all the other Russian henchmen — General Marchenko, the KGB’s Chernko, et cetera — must have gotten out via some tunnel from the COM, or possibly through some other secret exit that Western Intelligence hadn’t twigged to.