Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “I know that.”

  “But you only know that because those blabbermouths on TV have no regard for military security. If I’d had my way, I wouldn’t have allowed anything to be printed about the raid on Moscow. For my money every damn blabbermouth on those networks would—”

  “John, don’t go on about what you’d do to Peter Arnett. Besides, I don’t think it’s anatomically possible with a cannon.”

  The admiral scowled, Catherine patting his arm.”What were you going to say about David?”

  “He’s on the SAS/Delta Force list. They’re on twenty-four-hour call, Catherine — especially during crises like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Good God, Catherine. Siberia’s decision to—”

  “Oh, that. I’m sure they’re bluffing.”

  “Bluffing? Woman, haven’t you been watching the news?”

  “You told me I shouldn’t watch TV.”

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t watch it. I said you shouldn’t believe any of the goddamn—”

  “Then why watch it? And don’t swear. It makes you sound like a ‘lefty.’ “

  * * *

  While Admiral Brentwood was fuming, his youngest son was calm, made so by Georgina Spence’s attentions; but there was nothing inactive about his serenity, the blood pumping through him with every caress. The old stone cottage turned motel was a favorite among SAS because it was no more than fifty miles from Brecon Beacons, the three-thousand-foot-high twin peaks east of Carmarthen Bay that marked the site of the most gruelling commando courses in the world. He’d chosen the cottage carefully for he could be back in Hereford, SAS HQ, in a matter of hours should the call ever come.

  But here, in Laugharne, he and Georgina were away from it all, in the world of Under Milk Wood, not twenty minutes from the tiny, rough-and-ready room, with the copy of Van Gogh’s “Bedroom” tacked on the worn white wall, where the drunken genius of Dylan Thomas had poured forth its heart. For Georgina, despite what her father had earlier referred to as her “somewhat radical” politics, or perhaps because of them, the room had quite unexpectedly become a shrine when her cool reason happened upon the banal yet arresting truth of the heart that the “heart hath reasons that reason cannot know.”

  Georgina snuggled dose to him, holding him. The panic-filled disorientation of the nightmare drained from him as she gently nibbled a lobe of his ear, the nails of her trailing, sensuous touch stroking him until all thoughts of the Moscow raid were replaced by visions of her astride him, gently rocking back and forth, her hair softly whipping his chest, her lips against his. But for now Georgina hadn’t moved from where she was. But he knew she would stop stroking him soon, taking off the engagement ring, and he would moan, “Oh, God, no.” Which meant “Yes, but tease the a little longer.” Then slowly she would rise from the bed, fending him off, and walk about the room wearing his khaki drill shirt, slipping on, pulling up her panties, slowly swaying like a tart in front of him and then, holding onto the two bedstead knobs at the end of the bed, gently pushing herself, thrusting, against the brass bars, moving sideways against them.

  “No more!” he begged.

  She pretended not to hear him; then suddenly she pulled the cord of the overhead light and all was in darkness. He would have to find her. When he did she switched the light on. “I love you,” she said, and enjoyed watching him watch her. “We’ll do it,” she told him. “Any way, every way — until you’re sore.”

  He moaned, his arms outstretched, feeling for her hair.

  “Love you,” he said. In answer her tongue slid down on him, her lips tight about him, sliding back and forth with a furious intensity.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Deep in Ratmanov’s control bunker, Lieutenant General Dracheev was stressing the importance of a quick response to his Special-Purpose Forces, or SPETS — emphasizing how the moment any enemy paratroopers were detected or even suspected of being dropped on the island fortress, the SPETS teams must go out and engage. “Pomnite Antverpen “—”Remember Antwerp,” Dracheev reminded them. “Cut them to pieces before they even touched ground.”

  * * *

  As General Douglas Freeman stepped out of his plane onto the rain-polished tarmac at Elmendorf, and a push of reporters, some in anoraks, their hoods up against the pelting rain, crowded about him, he was handed an urgent message from the White House. It read:

  UNDER NO CONDITION ARE YOU TO PERSONALLY LEAD AIRBORNE ASSAULT. GENERAL J. GREY, JCS.

  Freeman’s first order upon arriving at Cape Prince of Wales was that the CBN reporter was to get off Little Diomede—”posthaste.” Another CBN reporter who challenged him on this order had a follow-up question. “Is it true, General, that you’ve referred to the Siberians as rats?”

  “Well, they sure as hell aren’t family,” retorted Freeman.

  Some of the British reporters from ITN thought this was rather good, but the CBN reporter was determinedly grim-raced. “Is it true, General, that you said, ‘We’ll pound them so hard’—” He consulted his notes.”—’they’ll have to pipe in sunlight’?”

  “I did not — wish I had!”

  The CBN lead story, flashed around the world, was that General Freeman called the Siberians “vermin.” As this was being received by enemy troops as well as those at home, the CBN reporter, in what he said would probably be his last broadcast from Little Diomede because of the general’s “extraordinary” order that no newsmen were to remain on the island, asked the general via the satellite linkup whether he was conscious of the “extremely delicate ecological system of the Arctic,” and did he have any information on “what adverse effects would be produced on the environment because of the imminent bombing of Ratmanov Island?”

  “Well, sir,” answered Freeman looking at the video hookup of the CBN reporter on the forlorn western side of Little Diomede, the same bitter Arctic wind tearing at the gaggle of microphones thrust before Freeman’s race and flapping the Eskimo-style hood of the CBN man. “Seems you’re a lot less worried than I am about the environment.”

  “What do you mean, General?” asked the reporter, somewhat nonplussed by the unexpected retort. All the reporters at the conference were now looking at the linkup picture of the CBN reporter on Little Diomede.

  ‘ “That blue fur collar on your hood,” said Freeman. “Arctic fox, isn’t it?”

  The reporter’s face was turning red. “I — don’t know, General.”

  Freeman looked grim. “I respectfully suggest, sir, that you find out. Blue Arctic fox is on the endangered species list. One of the most beautiful animals on God’s earth. Crying shame to be butchering them just to keep us warm. You should know—” The general turned to all of the reporters clustered about him, some of them wearing identical parkas, “—that it is strict Defense Department policy not to use animal fur in deference to our concern for the environment. Synthetics only — and that goes for everything from gloves to full winter uniform.”

  * * *

  “That true?” asked Colonel Dick Norton, the general’s aide.

  “Yes it is, Dick. My God, did you see that Greenpeace fella? Thought he’d have a goddamn stroke right on the spot. That’ll break up their marriage with the media for a while I’ll tell you.” Stopping, pulling on his gloves tightly, he told the general of Alaska Air Command, “I want that CBN joker off Little Diomede. Now!”

  “And if he doesn’t go?” enquired a brassy CBN news crew chief out of Anchorage.

  Freeman ignored the newsman’s question. He had learned his lesson in Iraq. To give them a deadline by which they had to remove the reporter from the island might be to let slip an approximate ETA for the new wave of U.S. bombers he was asking Alaska Air Command to send over Ratmanov. Instead, Freeman told the news chief that Little Diomede would undoubtedly be suspected by the Russians of being a laser indicator — bouncing lasers off suspected Soviet SAM and radar sites to provide slide cones down which laser-guided bombs could plummet to their targets with pinpo
int accuracy. In fact, no such plan was afoot. The laser designators would be the attacking aircraft themselves.

  Freeman entered his mobile trailer, which was dug deep in the Alaskan tundra on Cape Prince of Wales, and gave his second order for Alaska Air Command to undertake another bombing run against Ratmanov. If it was effective, it would give the enemy commander a surprise Freeman doubted he could anticipate.

  Kneeling beside his cot, Freeman prayed that he would be proven wrong — that Rat Island might be neutralized quickly and effectively. As he made his supplication he could hear the sonic booms racing across the tundra only fifty miles away from the enormity that was Siberia.

  * * *

  It was only a few pinpricks of light on the amber screen at first, and the Siberian operator on the eight-to-midnight watch deep in Ratmanov control dismissed it as possibly a burst of white noise caused by the notoriously changeable Arctic atmosphere. But the next second the top third of the screen was a haze of tiny lights, and he knew what it was. He called the officer of the watch. “Khlam”—”Chaff,” he told the lieutenant — strips of foil cut to various wavelengths to clutter the radar, overloading it with incoming signals, as a cover for another air attack. The only good thing about the chaff was that it meant the Americans couldn’t use laser slides — the chaff would cut the beam.

  * * *

  “Outboard personnel stand up!” It was the sergeant aboard the C-130 transport high above the chaff, finishing his air safety check. “Hookup! Check static line!”

  “Aw, shit!” responded the air force corporal, not seeing any humor in the sergeant sticking to normal jump procedure and wanting to get the hell out of Rat air space before “white tails”— Siberian surface-to-air missiles — began streaming up through the darkness. “Push ‘em out, Sarge. Let’s get the fuck outta here!”

  Outside in the black void the stars were so bright the corporal felt he could reach out and grab them, but below the thundering roar of the airplane the blackness was absolute; the dark camouflage mushrooms of the T-10 static line were quickly disappearing into the swirling clouds of Arctic air — so cold that even with full thermal issue the corporal’s throat felt a hot burn of the freezing Arctic air. The fifteen-foot yellow static lines fluttered now like ribbons above the swirling, chaff-riven night.

  In Ratmanov’s complexes one and two, north and south, the guttural Klaxons sounded, like submarines diving, as smudge-faced SPETS zipped up white overlays, snatched weapons from the rack, and raced for the spiral exit shafts that wound one hundred feet through the rock up to the wind-swept surface of the barren, snow-roofed island, ready to engage the enemy before they even touched ground. Five minutes later two Stealth F-117As swept in low at 690 miles an hour on a south/north run. Even at this subsonic speed they were over the five-mile-long island in twenty-seven seconds. Most of the chaff had now dissipated, and Siberian radar picked up one of the Stealths via ultrA-10w frequency radar and fired an SA-10 but missed.

  Even though the SPETS were already out and had closed the triple-armor manhole covers of the exits, the infrared video taken by the Stealths in their twenty-seven-second overflight revealed the exits, the latter’s HE, or heat emission, spots distinct against the snow — showing up on the video film like white, overexposed blurs on a negative. The moment he was awakened and given the information — ten exits, five north, five south of the island’s midpoint — Freeman ordered them CMR’d — computer map referenced. It was done in less than five minutes. While his staff was exultant with the way he had dropped weighted chutes, duping the Ratmanov commander into sending out his troops and so revealing the exit/entrance positions, Freeman was too busy to celebrate.

  “Alright, Jim,” he told his air commander. “Tell your boys we’re going to give ‘em the can of Raid — make up for what those cruise missiles of yours failed to do. Get them to drop three laser-guided babies on each of those exits. Two-thousand pounders. Mightn’t do the trick, but it’s better’n dropping dumb proximity iron bombs.”

  The whooping continued in the revetted mobile home that was Freeman’s Prince of Wales HQ. “You suckered ‘em, General!”

  Freeman told everyone to quiet down. It was true he had tricked the Siberians — a bunch of hotshot SPETS now running across the snow shooting at dummies or whatever the air force could put on the end of a chute to simulate an airborne attack on the Russian radar. But if the laser-guided bombs didn’t blow up the exits, penetrate and spit some fire down the seams between the exit plates and rock, then he’d have to go in with the airborne after all. “Just pray those bombs do the job, gentlemen,” Freeman told them. Someone who’d lost a buddy in one of the F-111s mumbled that so far God hadn’t been listening.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Across the dark blue of Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island, the first big island near Alaska in the Aleutian Chain, Lana La Roche, née Brentwood, and Elizabeth Ryan, a black nurse from Boston, could see the bobbing lights of the fishing boats that normally plied the seas north of the Aleutian arc south of the ice pack. The harbor this evening was fairly glistening with the dipping lights of the small but powerful deep-sea trawlers that had run for cover in the harbor before a clump of Arctic fronts that were en route from the Pole with 150-kilometer-per-hour winds in the offing.

  “I thought,” said Lana easily, “there was supposed to be a blackout in progress?”

  “You know what those fishermen are like, honey,” said Elizabeth, who had done her nurse’s training with Lana on the East Coast at a joint U.S./Canadian navy hospital in Halifax and from which Lana had been officially “transferred”—in effect exiled for having given a young, dying British seaman a woman’s caring touch aboard an Allied hospital ship.

  The head nurse at the hospital and on board the ship, Matron “Scud,” so-called because it was said that you never knew where she and her broomstick would land, had been outraged by Lana’s unprofessional conduct. So had Lana — for about five seconds. Then she realized she had only been guilty of being a woman who had given a dying man sexual release, something that, because of his youth and his very proper middle-class British upbringing, he’d hitherto not experienced. Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d actually been in the bed together. But it made no difference to Matron, and so Lana had been sent to “America’s Siberia”—the Aleutians. Yet, despite the fact that she didn’t like her posting in Dutch Harbor, that she always felt cold, she never regretted doing what she had done for the young Englishman. Look at what had ensued from it. His personal effects had been returned to his parents in England by Lana’s eldest brother, Robert, a submariner, when he had taken leave from Holy Loch in Scotland. Robert had met Rosemary Spence, the boy’s eldest sister, and ended up marrying her.

  “Till it hits them like a williwaw they’ll keep the lights blazing,” said Elizabeth. A williwaw was the hundred-mile-an-hour wind that, along with fog and rain and sunshine, which could all occur within half an hour, made the climate of the Bering Sea one of the most unpredictable and harshest on earth. It was one of the reasons Lana was so deeply touched by Elizabeth having voluntarily transferred to Dutch Harbor to be with her.

  “I hope they’re right,” responded Lana, “that it doesn’t get this far south. The fighting, I mean.”

  “You heard from your sweetie pie?” asked Elizabeth as they headed for the bridge that led over to the clutter of buildings and what little night life there was in the harbor.

  “No,” sighed Lana, her hands folded, sending a piece of ice skittering across the road as they made for the dirty shoulder of salt and snow to allow an army truck to pass. They were heading for “Stormy’s” restaurant, their big adventure for the week, to try some Greek chicken — one of the house specialties. Such outings from the naval base were rare now that the hospital, like so many other bases from Fort Ord to Faslane in Scotland, were reopening after only recently being closed down because of the Russian surrender at Minsk. The hospital staff found themselves short-handed. Everyone was working extra shift
s, preparing for what they all hoped would never happen: massive casualties coming in from the battles on and across the Bering Sea.

  She hadn’t heard from Frank for a month or so but knew it wouldn’t be long before he was mainland bound, to the naval air base at Elmendorf with two war tours in the Pacific behind him, during one of which he had shot down the MiG-29 Fulcrum state-of-the-art fighter flown by Soviet ace Sergei Marchenko as they’d mixed it up over the Yalu River in Korea. Though Shirer’s radio intercept officer in the Tomcat hadn’t seen a chute, and they’d both seen a pinhead-sized blossom that must have been the Fulcrum crashing into the frozen wastes of Manchuria, there had grown in Shirer’s mind a nagging doubt about whether the Russian had gone down with his plane. Meanwhile the twenty-seven-year-old Shirer had been celebrated, except in the La Roche papers, for having shattered the myth of the Marchenko invincibility among Allied pilots.

  “Where’s he going to?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Elmendorf,” said Lana. “He might already be there.”

  “Uh-huh,” murmured Elizabeth. Scuttlebutt was rife around any base in any war. They’d all been told that, and how rumors were sometimes spread by the enemy just to eat away at morale. So no way Elizabeth was going to tell Lana that there was a rumor floating around that Salt Lake City was in the thick of it, launching air strikes against some Russian island up in the strait, that some planes had been shot down. Anyway, maybe Lana was right, and her man was safe and sound at Elmendorf.

  “You know something, Elizabeth?” Lana asked, stopping.

  Elizabeth kept walking, glancing back.”Honey, you’ll freeze your ass off you don’t keep on truckin’!”

  “Elizabeth. What’ve you heard?”

  Elizabeth stopped and turned around. “All right. I heard that no-good husband of yours—Mister La Roche — has been living pretty high off the hog. I mean girls, lots of ‘em. Papers are full of it, they say.”