by Tom Clancy
“Sister, I’m listening to you next time,” Halverson cried. “And here comes another pair of 130s. Let’s get ’em. I want to head back to Igloo empty, refuel, rearm, and do it all over again!”
“Roger that!”
Halverson shut her eyes for just a second.
Jake, if you can hear me, then you know what I’m thinking…
Major Alice Dennison couldn’t afford to leave her JSF command post in Tampa and was closely monitoring the data coming in to her from Alaska, where the 11th Air Force and 3rd Wing from Elmendorf and the 354th Fighter Wing from Eielson had scrambled to intercept the Russian transports, along with that handful of JSF fighters whose pilots had been training in the Northwest Territories.
She couldn’t leave, but she shuddered with the desire to do so, to travel back to Gitmo and question Doletskaya again.
However, she had arranged the next best thing — a video conference with the prisoner.
And, despite her better judgment, she stole away to a private conference room for ten minutes to speak one last time with Colonel Pavel Doletskaya.
She thought maybe she could put the demons to rest and begin to actually sleep.
The colonel looked even more haggard than the last time she had seen him, gray stubble creeping across his chin, and it seemed an effort for him to keep his head upright. His eyes failed to focus, then finally he blinked and leaned forward, too close to the camera, then threw his head back and suddenly laughed.
“Colonel, stop it.”
After another few seconds, he composed himself and said, “I’m sorry, Major. I just… I can see that look in your eyes. So, are we happy with the information I gave you? Because you don’t look very happy.”
“No, we’re perfectly fine with it.”
His expression grew serious. “You’re bluffing.”
“You cried like a baby, Colonel. I know exactly what Operation 2659 is and exactly who Snegurochka aka the snow maiden is, all right?”
“So then, why have you interrupted my vacation?”
Dennison took a deep breath. Yep, she was bluffing. She hadn’t learned a damned thing — the bastard was the most highly skilled and resistant prisoner the interrogators had ever encountered. In fact, at this point, they swore he knew nothing…
But Dennison refused to believe that. “I just thought it would be in your best interests to formally defect. That way, you would enjoy the benefits of such a decision.”
“You don’t know anything, do you. You ran 2659 through every database in the world, compared the number to other operations, thought it might be an address, a date, a model number for the memory chip of a computer. You’ve had experts from every government agency looking at it, people trained to study ciphers, even that agent from the CIA who swears he decrypted the messages on that statue outside the office in Langley. What’s it called? Kryptos? Yes… But you know nothing — or rather, you know that I know everything about you.”
“Colonel, this is not a game. Do you have any idea how many innocent people are about to die?”
“I do — even more so than you.”
“Is it worth it?”
“Oh, those kinds of questions give me a headache, Major. I want to know if you have redecorated your apartment recently. Maybe you have pulled up the rugs, decided to buy some new lights for the ceiling? Or maybe some new paintings?”
“Operation 2659 is the invasion of Alberta. The snow maiden is the code name for an operative, a female operative who is part of or perhaps leading the mission.”
“Yes, you knew that before we ever met. The Euros fed you that on a spoon. And since then, you’ve spent all your time reading fairy tales…”
“This is your last chance, Colonel. Otherwise, you’re going to rot in prison for the rest of your life. You could defect, tell us what we need to know. You could work with us to bring a peaceful solution to this conflict.”
“Do you want to be president of the United States? Because you sound so convincing.”
“Did you murder Viktoria Antsyforov?”
“No, she killed me.”
“Colonel…”
“This I will tell you. She was my mistress, a brilliant officer, but her ego and ambition got in the way. I did not kill her, but she made many enemies in the GRU.”
“She was the snow maiden.”
“Of course not, Colonel. You are.”
Dennison snickered. “How am I part of your invasion plan?”
“You are the one with the cold heart who is trying to stop it. You are the one we worried about most of all.”
“I’m a JSF operations officer. I’m not chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I don’t wield that kind of power.”
“You are more powerful than you know.”
“Colonel, will you defect?”
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes. “Good-bye, Major.”
EIGHTEEN
The USS Florida had surfaced once more, and Commander Jonathan Andreas stood in the sail, shuddering against the cold wind and holding the satellite phone to his ear, waiting for someone to answer.
“Hello, Commander Andreas, this is COMPACFLT Duty Officer. Please hold for Admiral Stanton.”
She already knew he was calling?
He waited about twenty seconds, then a familiar voice jolted him. “Good morning, Jon. It’s Donald Stanton.”
“Uh, good morning,” he responded tentatively.
“How much time can you give me?”
Andreas glanced around at the black waves crashing against the equally black skin of his boat. “I’m comfortable with five to ten minutes, Admiral.”
“Very well, then—”
“But, uh, with all due respect, sir, can you tell me the title of that speech you gave in the old sub base auditorium last fourth of July?”
“Oh, that one,” Stanton said with a slight chuckle. “That would be ‘101 Ways Chief Petty Officers Trick Admirals into Believing We Run the Navy.’ ”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Good man. Now I’ll talk fast. The Russians shot down the ELF and Comsat satellite, Michigan’s back online, and we have one SITREP from you that’s two days old. News doesn’t get any better. The Russians have begun moving a large force, perhaps two brigades, into the Northwest Territories, most likely headed for Alberta, for the cities, the oil reserves, the whole shebang. I’ve heard they’re running more sorties than they did in Paris. On top of that, the president ordered the destruction of the International Space Station, since the Russkies used it to shoot down our satellites and were preparing to strike other targets. Now you talk, Jon, I’ll listen.”
Andreas’s mouth fell open, and it took a few seconds before he could launch into a capsule summary of his observations regarding the Russian task force, concluding with, “Sir, request permission to destroy those ships.”
“Permission granted.”
“There’s an opportunity at 0500, when they’ll engage in refueling ops. I’m going to seize it.”
“Excellent. For now, though, get back under, stay safe, and make this your last voice call. We’ll start sending you traffic via the sat phone data link so you don’t need to transmit anything. I’m sure you’ve already surmised this phone is manned 24/7, and right now it’s the only working number on the Iridium system.”
That explained how the duty officer knew who was calling when she answered the phone.
“Aye-aye, sir. I’ll try to poke my nose up every two hours starting from the termination of this call.”
“Good.”
“Oh, and one personal item, Admiral: please have someone call my wife and tell her to change our PIN.”
“Right. I’ll call her myself. Good hunting, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Andreas thumbed off the phone, his thoughts still whirling as he barked out the orders to dive, dive, dive!
It was at Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Team Sergeant Nathan Vatz had been taught how to wear a parachute harness and ha
d stood near the mock door, waiting for his turn to learn the proper method of exiting an aircraft.
The parachute landing fall platform had allowed him to develop the proper landings, while the lateral drift apparatus had helped him acquire the proper technique for controlling the chute during descent.
Then there was the good old thirty-four-foot tower, which let you experience a jump into nothingness. And once you got to the 250-foot tower, you were feeling good about yourself — until you saw someone make a mistake.
Still, Vatz had survived, made his qualification jumps, and had kept current by jumping at least once every three months.
Yes, it seemed like yesterday. Felt like yesterday, too. He still got the jitters every time he jumped, despite the hundreds of hours in other training courses he’d attended at Fort Bragg, the ones that had really kicked his butt.
Now that butt was firmly planted on the bright red web seat of a C-130’s vibrating hold with the rest of his new twelve-man ODA team.
Vatz had barely gotten to know these guys, and he still mixed up a few names. That was all right. There’d be plenty of time to get to know one another, after they finished their work.
And thanks to the Russians, the best way to get to work was to engage in HALO operations, an SF specialty.
What you did was you jumped from your perfectly good aircraft at a high altitude, in their case 25,000 feet, allowed yourself to freefall for a while at terminal velocity, then engaged in a low opening of your parachute so you could glide in clandestinely on your target from miles away, the target in this case being the sleepy little town of High Level, population: less than five thousand.
In order to perform such a miracle, Vatz and his fellow operators had to don their heavier helmets and oxygen masks. Their high-speed downward fall, coupled with their forward airspeed and the fact that they wore a minimal amount of metal, would allow them to defeat Russian radars.
A report from the pilot came in: winds were at twelve knots and holding. That was good. If they got up over eighteen knots, they’d have to abort the jump.
Thirty minutes prior they had all been breathing one hundred percent oxygen to flush the nitrogen from their bloodstreams, and the flight psychologist was making sure no one flipped out before the ramp opened.
Breathing in all that pure oxygen was a huge deal because hypoxia was a huge enemy. Without enough air, you could lose consciousness, fail to open your chute, and literally dig your own grave.
Vatz had seen it happen. Twice. And both times the problem had occurred when changing over from the pre-breather to the oxygen bottle. Those guys had allowed nitrogen to slip back into their bloodstreams. At least neither had felt the impact. They’d just blacked out, dropped, hit the ground.
He shuddered. A dozen other things could go wrong, too, stuff he couldn’t even imagine. They had to jump in a tight-knit formation, and one bad move by himself or a fellow operator could result in a fatal midair collision. No, Vatz had never seen anyone die from that, but he’d seen a lot of guys slam into each other.
At their stage of the game, though, those things shouldn’t be issues. But if your name was Nathan Vatz, you always thought about them in the minutes before the jump.
And there wasn’t much else to think about. If he didn’t focus on that, he’d be back to Doletskaya or Green Vox, imagining himself exacting revenge on those bastards.
Or he’d be back to that night in the chopper, watching his brothers die before his eyes—
And asking the same damned question over and over: Twelve good men went into Moscow, and only one came out. Why me?
The jumpmaster gave them the twenty-minute warning, which they all acknowledged with a great cheer: it’d been nearly four hours since they’d lifted off from Gray Army Airfield.
Then the jumpmaster went through his checklist. Helmets and oxygen mask, check. CDS switches, load marker lights, anchor cable stops, ramp ADS arms, cargo compartment lights, all good for him.
“Complete!” he boomed.
And as all safety-minded paratroopers did, they checked the gear of the men ahead of them. Again. And again. Perhaps four, five, maybe six times.
Some said the last twenty minutes before a jump were the longest of their lives. Not for Vatz.
He blinked.
And they were on their feet, the ramp open and locked, the navigator coming over the radio to say, “Ten seconds.”
They were nearly on top of the CARP — the computerized airborne release point — which accounted for all the data coming in from the aircraft’s systems and the current weather conditions. Vatz was glad neither he nor anyone else in the company had to figure out those calculations. They’d thrown some of that math at him back at Fort Bragg, and he’d spent most of the time ducking.
All right, the time had finally come.
The eight officers, seven warrant officers, and sixty-seven enlisted soldiers of Vatz’s Special Forces company were about to go for a little walk.
But then the pilot cursed, and the navigator screamed over the radio: “We got a missile locked on! Get ’em out! Get ’em all out!”
Vatz’s mouth went to cotton. He now knew those pilots had discovered they’d been probed by enemy radars a while ago, but they hadn’t said anything. No need to cause a plane full of SF guys to get unraveled. The Russians had poured so much money into new technology that they’d been routinely defeating JSF electronic countermeasures, and wasn’t it Vatz’s luck that his ride up to Canada had a bull’s-eye painted on its nose?
Nevertheless, the reaction of the men inside the cargo hold was a testament to the professionalism of Special Forces operators everywhere.
There was no frantic rush to the ramp, no mob scene of helmeted troopers stampeding to get out.
They began the jump as they ordinarily did — just ten times faster, the jumpmaster hidden behind his visor and waving them on. Vatz’s helmet was equipped with the latest, greatest, and smallest generation of night-vision goggles attached over the visor. A host of other readings, including data from his wrist-mounted altimeter and parachute automatic activation device (AAD), were fed to him via a head’s-up display in the visor itself. The unit automatically switched on as he left the ramp, among the first twenty or so to exit, along with their heavy equipment/ordnance crates.
Down below, lights shone like phosphorescent stitching on a black quilt, but those stitches were few and far between. This part of Canada was scarcely populated.
Also somewhere down there was the railroad, and the river, but he couldn’t see them just yet.
No one said a word over the intra-team radio.
They were all holding their breaths, Vatz knew.
A slight flash came from the corner of his eye, and he craned his head, just as the missile struck the C-130 in the tail, impacting right above the open ramp — even as operators were still bailing out.
He couldn’t even say Oh my God.
He was shocked into silence. The aircraft exploded in a fluctuating cloud of flames that swallowed the operators floating away from the tail.
Vatz deliberately rolled onto his back and watched as the roiling sphere of death grew even larger, pieces of flaming debris extending away from it, trailing tendrils of smoke.
And it was all delivered to Vatz in the grainy green of night vision as operators suddenly appeared from the cloud, on fire and tumbling hopelessly toward the earth.
The voices finally came over the radio, burred with anger, tight with exertion, high-pitched in agony. He listened to his brothers try to save each other, listened to some gasp their last breaths…
As he floated there with a front-row seat, his pulse increasing, his breath growing shallow, every muscle in his body beginning to tense.
Until suddenly someone struck him with a terrible thud, knocking him around into an uncontrollable barrel roll.
Flames flashed by.
He’d been hit by one of the dead guys.
He had to recover and fast. The longer he
rolled, the longer it’d take to recover.
He arched his back, extended his arms, but kept rolling. Someone called his name.
Part of him thought it was no good. He should’ve died back in Moscow with the rest of them. He’d been living on borrowed time.
Then he heard Rakken telling him how lucky he was, having escaped death twice. Why not make it a hat trick?
Hell, he could’ve been blown up with the plane. Giving up now would be a terrible waste.
And then he thought about his dead brothers. They needed him to carry on. He remembered the last few lines of the Special Forces Creed:
I am a member of my nation’s chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.
A sacred trust.
Damn it, he would not let them down.
He arched his back again, thrust out his arms, and screamed to regain control.
The roll slowed, and he was disoriented, the altimeter’s digital readout ticking off his descent, the ground still spinning a little, but he was on his belly, and his detachment commander was calling him on the radio.
He took a deep breath, about to answer, when he spotted the long column of smoke in the distance…
Where the C-130 had once been.
NINETEEN
Rearmed and refueled, Major Stephanie Halverson streaked down the runway, engine roaring, her gear just leaving the ground as dozens of Russian bombs finally hit Igloo Base.
She pulled up and away, banked left, and came around to witness a chilling sight.
The snow-covered Quonset huts housing the enlisted soldiers’ bunks, the offices, and the officers’ quarters burst apart, ragged pieces of metal flying everywhere as chutes of fire swept through them and ignited the stands of lodgepole pines behind the base.
Barely two seconds later, the refueling trucks went up like dominoes, their crews trying to evacuate in HMMWVs but caught in the blast.
Those explosions triggered several more among the smaller vehicles parked nearby, just outside the two hangar facilities that stood only a moment more before two bombs suddenly obliterated them.
