Man on Ice

by Humphrey Hawksley

  The military equipment was standard – helmet with goggles hitched up on the rim, pouches on the Kevlar vest, a routine issue Vityaz automatic rifle, Makarov 9mm pistol, and a sheathed knife about five inches long, probably with a double-edged blade. The challenge was the radio that was in a pouch at the bottom of the Kevlar. Its wire trailed up to the mouth and earpieces. On an operation like this, it would be button and not voice activated to avoid clustering the radio channels.

  He took half a step to his right, shifting his weight as he turned, towel screwed up in his hand, arm raised to drop it in the bin. The tap still ran. The toilet cistern was filling up; plenty of background noise. From the outside, Rake looked nice and relaxed.

  Inside he was taut like a spring, and he needed to wind tighter. In a hairsbreadth of a second, he hurled himself forward, the heel of his hand smashing the younger soldier’s nose so that shards of cartilage protruded into the brain. He wrapped his arms around the helmet and wrenched back the neck, snapping it and severing the spinal cord. The man crumpled, but Rake held him up as a battering ram, crashing into the older soldier’s chest, a solid strike of Kevlar against Kevlar, helmet against helmet.

  Rake let go of the dead soldier and kicked the older guard hard in the groin. As his legs buckled, Rake ripped out the radio wire. He fisted his bloodied fingers, pushing out the forefinger, and struck towards the windpipe.

  The soldier was too fast for him, bringing up his arm, intercepting and gripping. He held it with enormous strength, his eyes narrowed into a pinpoint of focus. The two men’s faces were an inch apart.

  ‘Stop,’ said the soldier in Russian. ‘I will help you.’

  NINE

  The White House, Washington, DC

  Stephanie stood to the left of the Oval Office desk listening to the conversation between the Russian and American leaders on speakerphone. President Christopher Swain stood, hand on hip, his eyes moving around the information on screens on his desk. He was an athletic figure with short curly gray hair and the face of a ponderous academic with eyes that emanated authority. A dozen or so officials from Defense, State, and the intelligence agencies clustered around two pastel-yellow sofas that faced each other midway in the room. Holland stood next to Slater by a window in the oval curve.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, Viktor,’ Swain said with a tone far more relaxed than the atmosphere of the room.

  ‘Not at all, Chris,’ said Lagutov. ‘I would have called you, but I only learned this myself from news broadcasts. We have a new regional commander in the east. He told me that an emergency radio call was intercepted at our base on Ratmonova, the island that you call Big Diomede. A pregnant girl’s life was in critical danger, and he ordered a helicopter across to help her. In the heat of the moment, no one remembered to let you guys know. I’m sorry for the panic. But the good news is that I’ve just heard the baby has been delivered by emergency Caesarean section, a little girl, and both she and the mother are stable.’

  ‘Thank you, Viktor.’ Swain kept glancing at his own tablet and a wall screen constantly updated with satellite and radar images. ‘And are they still with you?’

  ‘They are,’ continued Lagutov in his casual tone. ‘The baby has been named Iyaroak, which means apple of the eye in Inupiat, their native language.’

  A ticker tape processed from the Situation Room below ran on the screen. All cellphones jammed. No contact Little Diomede.

  ‘And are her parents with her?’ The ticker read: Russian attack 4 KA-52s 3 troop carrier M-8s.’ The screen showed radar images of Russian helicopters crossing the border.

  ‘Two relatives are there.’

  ‘That’s good. She needs family with her.’ The ticker read: Heavy cloud. No satellite. Holland paced, a measured contrast against Swain’s calmness. Swain’s tablet relayed a feed from the Tin City radar station, the closest site to the Diomede islands. Four Black Hawk helicopters were an hour away. Six F-22 fighters had been scrambled from the Elmendorf-Richardson airbase in Anchorage.

  ‘We’ll send a helicopter across to pick up the mother and baby and fly them to Nome,’ said Swain.

  Lagutov allowed a moment of hesitation which Swain filled. ‘Jim Hoskins, Governor of Alaska, can fly to Nome with your consul-general. They’ll do a photo op. You and I can talk about our friendship and Russia helping an American in crisis.’

  ‘I’m told you don’t have helicopters available,’ Lagutov said abruptly.

  The Oval Office atmosphere tensed. The Russian radar stations on the eastern coastline would detect that Black Hawks and F-22s were close. Either Lagutov was lying or he wasn’t being briefed, which could be worse because it meant he wasn’t in charge. Or he did know and he was winging it because he did not have a Plan B, unimaginable as it might seem.

  ‘Apparently, that’s fixed.’ Swain’s tone hardened slightly. Prusak motioned that he should keep talking. ‘It seems with helicopters we’ve gone from famine to feast, a Black Hawk at Teller and one at Kotzebue, both mainland settlements. So, we’ll send one straight to your base on Big Diomede to pick them up—’

  ‘Hold, Chris,’ interjected Lagutov. ‘Someone here’s updating me.’

  The ticker tape read: Nuclear submarines Seawolf-class Connecticut and Virginia-class Washington in Arctic region. 190 minutes out.

  Prusak switched the line so the Russian side could hear nothing.

  ‘If those subs are under the ice, they’re not much good against these.’ Holland’s finger jabbed towards the images of the four Russian attack helicopters.

  Defense Secretary Mike Pacolli contradicted him: ‘The Connecticut carries IDAS missiles that can bring down a helicopter from a submerged position, and if you’d ever seen one of those beasts break up through ice, you would not treat their presence lightly.’

  Holland glared. ‘This is a ground war, Mr Secretary. It needs boots on ice, not computers under the sea.’

  ‘What else do you have, Mike?’ asked Swain.

  ‘Refueling tankers for the F22s are airborne, sir. Drones, two AWACs, and satellites deployed. A marine battalion is on its way to Wales. That is twenty-five miles from Little Diomede. They’ll go in by helicopter or across the ice to the island.’

  Holland brushed his hand down his cheek, unable to hide his surprise at the speed with which the whole range of American military options had swung into action. His campaign had been against a coward who had failed to protect America. He was seeing for the first time how the authority of one man can deploy such immense military power.

  ‘This is the easy part,’ said Swain. ‘The tough bit is making sure we don’t use them.’

  Lagutov was back, his tone formal. ‘President Swain, I’m patching you through to Admiral Alexander Vitruk, the commander of our Far East Military Region. He took the initiative to go straight to Krusenstern when he heard of the medical emergency. Admiral Vitruk can enlighten us all.’

  ‘Krusenstern is Little Diomede,’ Stephanie mouthed to Swain.

  A photograph of Vitruk, tanned, lean, purposeful, appeared on one of the Oval Office screens. As soon as he spoke, voice authentication confirmed that this was indeed the dominant figure who ran the Russian Far East. His bio-data unfolded next to the photograph. A veteran of Russia’s campaigns in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria, he had forged friendships with the Chinese, North Koreans, and Mongolians. He had been a defense attaché in Washington, DC, had visited Nome and Anchorage, and had even initiated joint US–Russian training exercises out of Elmendorf-Richardson.

  ‘This is a humanitarian mission, Mr President,’ said Vitruk. ‘They pleaded with us to save these lives and that is what we are doing.’

  Without identifying himself, Matt Prusak cut in. He could not allow the President to speak directly to the regional commander of a foreign adversary. The Russian would put it all over their media as President Swain pleading for help. ‘We have a Black Hawk en route to bring back the patient, Admiral,’ Prusak said. ‘You are being patched thr
ough to General Davies of our Northern Command with whom you can discuss details.’

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ Vitruk replied. ‘Your aircraft cannot enter Russian sovereign airspace. If it does, I cannot guarantee its safety.’

  TEN

  Little Diomede, Alaska, USA

  Rake wore the uniform of the dead Russian.

  The surviving soldier was Sergeant Matvey Golov of the 83rd Airborne Brigade based in Ussuriysk, north of Vladivostok. Disarmed and with his helmet removed, Golov came across as a squat imposing figure, the surface of his shaved skull rutted like a bad road, his eyebrows thick and his eyes drawn in.

  Golov said his unit had left for this mission two days ago. He had family in New York, and didn’t plan to become an enemy of the United States. Rake interrogated him quickly and neither believed nor trusted him. However, Golov could have killed him and hadn’t, and he would now be Rake’s ticket out.

  ‘If you cross me I will cripple you and leave you for your colleagues to finish you off as a traitor to Russia,’ Rake told him. Golov didn’t respond.

  To get across the ice to the mainland, Rake would need more weapons. Russian small arms were not enough. The closest would be in the sealed and abandoned Alaska Army National Guard observation post that stood among civilian homes in the middle of the village. That’s if they hadn’t been cleared out. No military had been posted to Little Diomede since the 1990s when the post was closed. Weapons and communication equipment were inside, logged, stored, and long forgotten within the army bureaucracy. But Rake had no idea what condition they would be in. More weapons might be further along in a wooden cache underneath the church where they kept seal, walrus, and other meat over the winter months. Don Ondola had hidden them there, and Rake doubted they had been touched since Alaska State Troopers took Ondola away for murdering Akna’s mother. Ondola was a rough man, selfish, drug-crazed, and violent. But he knew how to keep a weapon functioning against the wet and the cold.

  Rake flipped the magazine out of Golov’s Vityaz automatic, ejected the 9mm rounds, and handed the weapon to Golov. Other Russian troops must not see him unarmed. Rake did the same with the Makarov pistol. He took Golov’s phone and asked how it worked. The Russian explained that men on each post would be setting up their own Wi-Fi hotspot that only they could use.

  They carried the body into the school kitchen and slid it down the rubbish chute where it landed with a thud on the trash of the past days.

  Helmets on and faces covered, Golov led the way out of the school. Two soldiers guarded the entrance. There was a short conversation, which Rake had anticipated. Where was the American Eskimo? Golov pointed back inside. Change of plan. The American was staying in the school. They were off to search his house.

  They walked on. Troops were positioned between the school and the helipad. They were on the roof of the old wooden building containing the clinic and launderette and along tiers of walkways that linked the small homes. On the top of the circular concrete water-treatment plant, they were positioning a heavy machine gun. Another machine gun had been set up by the cemetery that overlooked the village. More dangerously, troops were walking up the hillside toward the snow-covered plateau. From there they would have a view to the mainland to see anyone crossing in either direction.

  That high watchpoint might make it impossible for Rake to escape the island. It rarely got completely light, rarely dark either because of moonlight. In this second half of the month, the moon hung in the sky, blending with the ice and sun that hovered around the horizon. Rake also had no idea of the thickness of the ice. Someone had gone through it near Wales, which was the closest landfall and where he might go. When he was a child, they used to clear a runway on the ice for a plane to land. Now winter was too warm and the ice too thin.

  Rake led Golov up wooden steps to a landing with a bench and space for people to hang out. Two Russian sentries leant on railings, their gaze fixed to where Russian helicopters, red and blue lights blinking, hovered in the sky just behind the border. On the island’s helipad, the blades of an M-8 transport helicopter rotated slowly while soldiers unloaded equipment. Rake saw a Kord 12.7mm heavy machine gun, powerful enough to send a wall of lead against an approaching helicopter. He counted three Igna hand-held surface-to-air missile launchers.

  By now the long-range radar at Tin City would have picked up what was going on, but not the detail. He needed to get word out that Russia was seriously reinforcing its hold on the island with hostages in the school.

  The walkway sloped up. They passed Henry and Joan’s house. On the ledge outside sat the skull of the polar bear that Henry had shot with Rake all those years ago. On the rocks in front, the skin of a gray seal stretched between wooden poles. Nearby, its meat hung drying on a line of red nylon rope.

  Midway up, they came to the dark-green hut that used to be the army post. The Russians were already there. Tape was spread across its small windows. The door had been broken down and they had put a searchlight in the small watchtower and a machine gun on the roof. Whatever weapons were in there were now off limits. A soldier stood outside. The pinpoint glow of a cigarette shone through his mist of breath.

  The soldier spoke to Golov, who replied, not just an acknowledgment, but a longer sentence that Rake couldn’t hear because of the wind. The Russian pointed inside the guardhouse, then across the water to the waiting helicopters. Rake shifted his fingers around his weapon. Above them the search lamp went on and off. They were testing it.

  Rake turned away, and brought out from his pocket the phone Carrie had given him. There was no signal. But the screen showed a link to the personal hotspot from inside the guardhouse. He drew off his glove to work the keypad and find the three numbers Carrie had given him. The first was her sister Angela with a Brooklyn 718 prefix. Next came a +41 22 code, which was Geneva, someone called Jenny who worked at one of the international aid agencies. Then there was a listing for SL, +1 202 – Washington, the ambassador, Carrie’s first choice.

  Russian and American signals intelligence would pick up any phone message that went out. It was late evening in Washington and the middle of the night in Europe. The chances were that SL was asleep. Rake wrote the message clear and short. His finger was sliding down to send when two F-22 fighters screamed overhead from south to north along the border. Seconds later two more flew fast and low from north to south. They looped back towards the mainland. The noise faded, and he heard a child’s voice. ‘Bang, Bang. I’m a Russian and you’re dead, Uncle Rake.’

  Timo, Akna’s seven-year-old brother, appeared from nowhere and wrapped his arms around Rake’s legs. He must have slipped away as the soldiers were searching homes. Timo wore a green down jacket, but wasn’t dressed to be in the cold for any length of time. His teeth chattered.

  The Russian soldier shifted from watching the aircraft to the little boy.

  ‘Why are you dressed like a Russian?’ Timo asked loudly. The soldier glanced at Golov, then back to Rake.

  The sky erupted with engine noise again. American helicopters from the Alaskan mainland – four Black Hawks and four Apaches – came around from both the north and south edges of the island. Their searchlights swept the village and the hillside. They spread out in a two-tiered line, Black Hawks below, Apaches above, right on the border, flood lamps facing down the Russian aircrews on the other side. The F-22s returned in a deafening roar. Then the American helicopters shut off all their lights and hung ghost-like in the sky. No shots were fired, no missiles unleashed. It was a ‘don’t mess with us’ test of Russian resolve. Did Moscow want it the easy way or the hard way?

  The Russian guard raised his weapon. Rake pressed the Washington number, sending the message just as Golov ripped the phone from his hand.

  ELEVEN

  The White House, Washington, DC

  A message alert flashed on Stephanie’s phone. It appeared in a small strip across the top of the screen then faded. She saw it but wasn’t focusing. Vitruk’s refusal to allow an Ame
rican helicopter to the Russian base to pick up the Eskimo girl and her baby had drawn everyone’s concentration into the narrowest channel.

  Holland paced the room. ‘Mr President, you must now accept that my first analysis of this crisis was correct. You need to take out their command and control center on Big Diomede island.’

  ‘Then the United States risks losing its ally in Britain,’ said Kevin Slater. ‘Nor will Europe support—’

  ‘Bull, Prime Minister, and you and Ambassador Lucas know it,’ countered Holland. ‘Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania will back a strong response. They’ve been taking Kremlin crap for years.’

  ‘Not if Moscow retaliates against them,’ argued Slater. ‘You have never witnessed a war on your soil, in your neighborhood, engulfing your family.’

  ‘We should call the German chancellor,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘Not from here,’ said Slater. ‘We need to go back to the embassy.’

  From the embassy, they would have secure communications. But for Stephanie there were others who could talk to the Germans and the French. Slater would be better off in the White House because he would know what was going on and it would show Britain at the heart of the crisis.

  ‘You need to make a decision, Mr President,’ said Holland.

  Prusak flipped to a visual feed from a Black Hawk helicopter hovering between the Russian and American islands. The image was blurred by fog and snow. But there was enough to show two lines of aircraft narrowly separated by the invisible border. Streaks of red swept across the screen.

  ‘They’re the F-22s,’ said Pacolli. ‘They will keep doing that and the helicopter cordon will stay in place. Meanwhile, we’re testing the ice for moving troops on a sea crossing from Wales.’

  ‘Time weakens us,’ said Holland aggressively. ‘They need to be taught a lesson.’

  ‘Who are they, Bob?’ Swain deliberately traced his words with irritation. ‘Are they school kids whom we slap on the wrists until they do what we say? At this level, it doesn’t work like that.’