by Ian Slater
“I am,” Shirer told him.
“You!” said the commando, turning immediately to the RIO. “What airfield are you from?”
“My name is Captain Walter B.—”
“Vozmite ego!”—”Take him!” ordered the commando. Two of the other SPETS grabbed the captain. Shirer instinctively moved to help and felt himself lifted off the ground, the pain hitting a moment later, the blow to his stomach winding him so acutely that despite the howl of the wind moaning across the icy crust of the island, he could hear himself gasping hoarsely, his windpipe making a rasping sound as he struggled for breath. Amid the flashes of the Siberian ZSU-23 quads and streams of tracer gracefully arcing and climbing skyward he glimpsed his RIO at the edge of the cliff. “What airfield?” shouted one of the Russians holding him. Anderson wouldn’t answer. The next second he was gone off the cliff, his screams quickly lost beneath the loud rattle of the Siberians’ AA quads.
“Jesus!” shouted Shirer. “You bastards—” A SPETS hit him again, and he blacked out.
* * *
The navy’s air attacks from the Salt Lake City were fierce, fearless, and ineffective. The only thing that they achieved was a pervasive sense among the Siberian tunnel garrison of the superiority of their “Saddam Bunker” defensive measures-lessons learned from the Iraqis’ experience during the massive American and Allied bombing of ‘91.
Even if the starye perduny—”old feats”—in Russia’s Frunze Military Academy had not absorbed the experiences relayed to them by their pupils, the Republican Guard survivors, the lesson of the logistical brilliance of the Americans had been duly recorded by the Soviets’ Liberation Army Daily.
It was not so much the lesson of the U.S.’s “Smart” bombs, as, despite the propaganda spread about by what Novosibirsk called the unwitting dupes of the Western media, the Americans’ laser-guided weapons constituted only 7 percent of the total bombs dropped, the remainder being World War II iron bombs, some of these turned into GBU — guided bomb units— with the Pave penny laser seeker conversion kits. No, it was the logistical capability, the “tooth to tail” supply lines feeding and in general maintaining over a quarter-million men and machines with everything they needed, from 5.56 rifle rounds, HEAT (high explosive antitank) rounds, Starlight infrared night vision goggles, condoms (to reduce the 14 percent VD casualty rate of most armies), and MRE (meals ready to eat) trays, warmed by body heat alone, to toothpaste and toilet paper.
This logistical capability of the Americans was, in the Siberians’ eyes, the real victor of Desert Storm, as the Siberians believed that, man for man, their troops, raised, born, and trained in the Arctic, were far tougher than the American and British allies. The Americans were superb at organization and improvisation, the commanding officer, Lieutenant General Dracheev, pointed out to his two-thousand-man Ratmanov garrison, and the American capability was seared into the psyches of the entire garrison. The Siberians, in their “Saddam” tunnel complex, now moved with a well-oiled efficiency, as if some vast collective unconscious had risen from within the great rock to insulate them between Ratmanov and the Smart bomb attacks.
Only in two places, the northeastern end of the island and through a clutch of radar antennae, whose bases had become dislodged before they were able to be retracted far enough, did shrapnel from the Allied bombs permeate, killing eight men and wounding a score more. Even so, the integrity of the rock proved anew the feet, grudgingly conceded by the U.S. Air Force and the pilots of the navy Tomcats and the beloved Grumman A-6E Intruders, with their eighteen-thousand-pound bomb loads coming in from Salt Lake City, that aerial bombardment, though it might cause jaw-splitting headaches, toshnota—”nausea”— from “shock wave multiples,” and blurring of one’s vision, could not win against, or even dislodge, the deeply dug keepers in the oil-cushioned “Saddam” bunkers of Ratmanov Island.
Lieutenant General Dracheev, who knew that the sole reason for the Ratmanov garrison’s existence was to remain an immovable threat and obstacle to the Americans, obviating the need for Novosibirsk to risk precious aircraft over the strait, felt secure in his control bunker. Halfway down the island, it had been dug one hundred feet into the solid rock, three hundred feet in from the eastern cliff face.
He peered at the night sky though his infrared periscope, which could be used at either the level he was now standing, sixty feet below the surface of solid rock, or two levels further down in Control at the hundred-foot level. Seeing no sign of enemy activity and assured by his radar controllers that no air traffic could be detected in the local area of the Diomedes, Dracheev headed down toward his bunker from the first periscope level.
The concrete stairwell was watched over by a KPV Vladimirov heavy machine gun post, only part of its 135-centimeter-long barrel visible in the ball turret mounted in the door. At the machine gun the reinforced concrete stairwell took a downward-sloping U-turn to yet another closed door. Here, at the second of the three levels, another machine-gun inset had to be swung open to allow the commander and his aides into this eighty-foot level of the hundred-foot-deep bunker. The floor was a two-foot-thick antidetonator slab of reinforced concrete and high tensile steel. The next flight of stairs led to the air lock, in the event of chemical attack, outside the main command bunker at the one-hundred-foot level. All three levels were separated by at least ten feet of rock. The upper level contained a SPETS guard detachment, whose dormitories, canteen, and bunks were on the second level, which also contained all communications consoles, a conference room, and two bedrooms for Lieutenant General Dracheev and his aide, a SPETS colonel.
The lowest level was comprised of electricity generators, water tanks, along with air, water, and sewage filtration units. Other nuclear shelters like it had been built, but this command post had earned its name as a “Saddam” bunker because it had pressure-pumped, quick-setting, rubberized cement poured beneath it as well, filling every nook and cranny at the base of the enormous command center with what was effectively a hard, rubberized foundation four feet thick that even extended five to six feet outside the bunker to fill the gaps between the hewn-out rock shaft and man-made steel walls of the deep, rectangular bunker. This allowed it not only to withstand the shock waves of a nuclear burst but also to “move” on the rubberized foundation in the event of earthquakes and other natural realignments that radiated out from the inherently unstable Aleutian chain.
The Allies had heard rumors of such bunkers for years — ever since the Iraqi war, when they had failed to get Saddam as he moved from bunker to bunker. The Allies were better acquainted with the layout of the Siberian bunkers for the troops. It was a fundamentally simple design, combining the best German engineering with the best British steel to create a series of interlocking H-shaped “pipe tunnel” garrison complexes drilled out of the basalt.
The complexes, one deep below the northern half of the island, the other beneath the southern half, consisted of a series of prefabricated high-tensile steel “sewer pipe” tubes or rooms leading off from a connecting cylindrical tunnel corridor to form an H. Each of the sewer-pipe-shaped chambers was a one-hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-diameter barracks containing at least one hundred troops, who slept on fold-down bunks at the ends of the tube. It was an astonishingly cost-effective and efficient design, borrowed from the Federation of Nuclear Shelter Consultants and Contractors. Each H unit was only one hundred and fifty feet from end to end and barely two hundred feet left to right. An extra twenty feet of concrete extended from either side as an added margin of protection for the tubular barracks. In twenty H barracks, ten north of his command bunker, ten south, Dracheev housed a thousand troops together with a sick bay and kitchen stacked with dried foods. The air vents were cleverly concealed at surface level in natural rock chimneys and fissures all equipped with chemical attack filters. Dracheev’s command bunker, while midway between the two, was not connected by the usual ten-foot-diameter, tubular, bombproof corridor but a narrow two-and-a-half-foot-diameter crawl pipe so that
in the event of the island’s secure, buried land lines somehow being cut and radiotelephone links severed between the three elements, communications could be shuttled by the use of runners. The tunnel was only wide enough for one man at a time.
* * *
Though neither the British nor the Americans knew the extent of Ratmanov’s subterranean defenses, Freeman, en route to Alaska, doubted that the Russians would have failed to make any garrison as bombproof as possible, so that even as the B-1 bomber with its short-range attack missiles taxied down Elmendorf runway, Freeman was addressing himself to the problem. “Dick—” From force of habit he looked behind him to speak to Colonel Dick Norton, who had served as his aide in Europe and whom he had requested for this operation, momentarily forgetting he was still en route from Europe. “Reach, isn’t it?” he asked the young major who’d been appointed by the Pentagon as his interim aide.
“Ready and waiting, sir.”
“I want Three Soc up here and deployed at Cape Prince of Wales, ready for disembarkation in twenty-four hours.” Three Soc — Special Operations Capable — was the name for the twenty-two-hundred-man marine expeditionary unit, the smallest MAGTAF — Marine air-ground task force — unit out of Camp Smith, Hawaii, based on the Pacific Fleet’s Salt Lake City carrier.
“Yes, sir,” answered Reach, but even as he conveyed the order to one of the 727’s console operators for encoding he wondered aloud to Freeman whether it wouldn’t be better to collect the FMPac’s Hawaii-based marine expeditionary brigade. It was a force of almost sixteen thousand: fifteen thousand marines and five hundred and fifty navy, medical, and support liaison staff, in turn supported by forty Marine A-V/8 Harrier fighter bomber jump jets, F-18s, forty-seven assorted amphibious vehicles, troop-carrying hovercraft, and a hundred helicopters.
“Hell—” said Freeman, watching their ETA for Elmendorf Air Force Base change on the computer screen due to strong polar winds. “We’re not going ice skating.” The general could see Reach still didn’t get it.
“It won’t be amphibious, Dick — ah, I mean Reach. Johnny, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it won’t be amphibious, John. I want airborne. And fast.”
“Airborne!” said Reach. “A chopper assault?”
“What? Hell, no,” responded Freeman. “Siberians’d pick ‘em off those heavy assault Chinooks like flies with their SAMs. I mean HALO — high-altitude, low-opening chutes. Drop ‘em right on that goddamn Rat Island before the Rats know what’s hit ‘em. Anyone drifts off target — they’ll be all right. Wait on the ice until later. Marine choppers can pick ‘em up after they’ve taken in the MEV to mop up.”
Major Reach was astonished by Freeman’s plan, as was the British brigadier, now being apprised of Freeman’s request for a seventy-man squadron of joint British/American troops from the SAS — Special Air Service — unit out of Hereford in Wales, the same unit in which David Brentwood, Lana Brentwood’s younger brother, had so distinguished himself during the SAS’s breaching of Moscow’s innermost defenses.
“But General,” protested Reach, “don’t you think the hovercraft amphibians could launch an assault against the island? They have infrared, high-resolution optics—”
“No, I don’t. Pressure ridges between the Alaskan mainland and Diomedes stretch the full twenty-five miles. That’s no goddamned hockey rink out there, Reach. You ought to know that. It’s pack ice — thirty feet thick and rougher’n Granny’s tits. Up and down, movin’ all about. Those hovercraft’d get a good run going on that air cushion, then bang! An ice ridge, big as a house. Besides, it’d be a turkey shoot for those Rat batteries. Might as well give ‘em invitations to a ball. No, Major, I want the best parachute troops we’ve got.”
“Why don’t we call Fort Campbell?” suggested Reach. “Hundred and First Airborne. Get them and their 105 howitzers aboard those big C-141s. They could be up here within twenty-four hours. Or we could get the Eighty-Second Airborne’s Ready Brigade out of Fort Bragg?”
Douglas Freeman looked sternly at Reach. The young major seemed amiable enough, but two things about him were bothering the general. The first was that Reach either didn’t know or had forgotten that the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne were now only air mobile, no longer a parachute-delivered force, despite the retention of their gung ho title. The second thing was that Reach didn’t know the Eighty-Second Airborne were still in Europe, trying, along with the Brits and U.S. Ranger battalions, to penetrate the Ural Mountains on Siberia’s west flank. In any event, the marine expeditionary unit wasn’t to be a spearhead but would only go in after, if the SAS and any other special forces Freeman could dig up could first “unplug,” in the general’s words, “the Rat’s maze” that was Big Diomede.
“Reach?”
“Sir?”
“You’re fired! Don’t know a goddamn thing about the ice, and you still think the Eighty-Second is in North Carolina. You also think the One-Oh-One uses chutes. Nothing personal, Major, but I can’t afford to have you around. You don’t do your homework. You get yourself back to G-2. Bury yourself in Siberiana, and if God’s with you, you’ll get a second chance with me. But not against Rat Island. Your ignorance is too damned dangerous, son.”
In the silence between the Boeing’s banks of electronic consoles all that could be heard was the Boeing itself, its four twenty-one-thousand-pound Pratt and Whitney engines in a steady roar as if endorsing the general’s decision.
By the time the Royal Canadian Air Force F-18s from NORAD, released by headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain to escort the general’s plane for the second half of his journey to Alaska, were high over the Rockies in Alberta, Major John Reach’s unorthodox firing was known to everyone aboard the Boeing and among ground operators from Anchorage to Nome. Freeman hoped it would sweep right through Alaska Command, especially through the twenty-two hundred men of the MEU and to every pilot aboard the MEU’s four Apache attack choppers and those who would be driving the sixteen CH-46 and CH-53 medium- and heavy-lift assault transport choppers, to every man and woman associated with Operation Arctic Front, that old Hardass Freeman was back. Besides, if he didn’t take Rat Island, the Pentagon’d fire him. If he didn’t take it, he’d fire himself.
Freeman called Fort Bragg to ask for two of the remaining one-hundred-man Delta Force companies, the best combination of demolition, radio, and hand-to-hand specialists who, with their blood brothers, the SAS, would go in first.
However, Delta Force command, even drafting instructors from its Shooting House — used for antiterrorist training at Bragg — could come up with only seventy men at most, only as many as the SAS would have, the remaining SAS and Delta Force already in action trying to take out the Siberian prepo sites — giant ammunition and fuel dumps — believed hidden and well-camouflaged in the Urals. Most of these were American and British commandos from SAS and Delta Force who in ‘91 had been dropped behind the lines during the Iraqi war looking for the kind of upgraded Scuds that some Moslem fundamentalist groups were now threatening to use against the British and American southern command that was spread out between the Black and Caspian seas.
With SAS and Delta Force commandos combined Freeman would have only one hundred and fifty men at most to throw in on the HALO jump, but with what he had in mind — a quick, unexpected spearhead attack by the superbly trained British and American commandos — it might be enough. To bolster that confidence, he had personally requested that the survivors of the SAS raid into Moscow — especially young David Brentwood, who also had the experience of the Pyongyang raid behind him— be included in the attack.
Freeman also insisted Big Diomede be referred to as Rat Island because of the danger of mixing up Big Diomede and Little Diomede in the maze of radio transmits that would fill the air once the assault was underway, and that if the Siberians were stupid enough to risk sending troops across the ice to assault Little Diomede’s Patriot antiballistic missile batteries, the batteries should be destroyed.
The last thing Freeman said he wanted was casualties from “shorts” or AD — accidental discharge — that is, friendly fire. He knew better than most soldiers that up to 12 percent of all casualties would result from friendly fire anyway. After D-Day in July ‘44, the U.S. breakout from Rommel’s beachhead defenses into the bocage—the open hedgerow country — had been seriously delayed because of “shorts.” “Second Household Cavalry,” he told his new interim aide, “suffered more casualties preparing for D-Day than they suffered in the first four months after D-Day. You believe that?”
“Ah — yes. I don’t know, sir.”
“It’s true, all right,” said Freeman.
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know,” said the aide, still unnerved by Reach’s dismissal.
“No reason you should, Captain,” Freeman assured him.
“But just about every possibility in war has already been thought of. Trick is to think of it again.” Freeman smiled. “You read your history, Captain. It’s all in there.” Freeman steathed himself against the buffeting of a wind shear that suddenly sucked the plane down in a gut-wrenching plunge. All the while his gaze remained fixed on the play-dough model of Ratmanov that he’d made up after ordering four loaves of bread from the gallery, squeezing the bread into the tooth shape of the island.
“Course,” said Freeman, “there’s always the surprise factor.” Rule of thumb told him that for any assault on the island to stand a ghost of a chance he should have a five-to-one advantage, but then again that’s just what the Siberians would expect from the Americans — a massive chopper-borne attack.
Everything came down to a matter of speed — the kind of speed the black-hooded SAS had used on May 6, 1980, “cleaning out” the Iranian Embassy, taking out all the terrorists, and rescuing the hostages in eleven minutes flat — with the kind of professionalism and hair-trigger expertise that young Brentwood and his SAS troop had penetrated the Kremlin’s defenses. Suddenly Freeman was gripped by a bowel-chilling fear. He recalled the report of at least two navy flyers going down. They had ejected safely, but no ID flares appeared, though they would have shown up brilliantly against the snow if the flyers had had time to activate them. Which meant that the moment his SAS/Delta Force airborne troops landed, enemy troops might well be ready to swarm up and out like cockroaches, bringing the battle to the Allied force before any of the British or Americans had landed.”What we need against those rats,” said Freeman, “is a big can of Raid! Get the Elmendorf — the air commander.”
