Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “Then that’s decided it,” General Dracheev told his SPETS commando leader. “We only use the two emergency exits. Your men’ll have to move swiftly to get out in time—”

  “To do what?” asked the SPETS commander. Red lights were blinking all over at the control center’s console, indicating that rock flour, thick in the air from the bombs, had choked off some of the air filters, overheating them.

  Soon the red lights faded, the backup filters holding, and the duty officer informed him that all electronic indications were that the six exits he had decided not to use might be usable after all. Dracheev, however, would not be deterred from his plan. He never doubted for a second that an Allied airborne assault would now follow, but to use the six exits would be suicidal. They were almost certainly pinpointed by the Americans and would be among the first targets should another bombardment precede the Allied troop drop. Only this time, Dracheev told them, they’d outwit the Americans. To this end he called a hasty radio conference of the ten company commanders of the two SPETS battalions. He told the commanders, “The Allies’ll realize they cannot bomb us out, that no matter how many bombs they drop, ultimately they will have to use troops. In this, gentlemen, we have the overwhelming advantage, for when they try to dig us out they can’t be dropping bombs on their own men.” He turned to the SPETS commander, his tone crisp with confidence.

  The SPETS commander, a full colonel, soon understood the reason for the general’s rush of confidence. Dracheev was good on his feet — a commander who didn’t need hours to ponder a problem and used the American general’s initiative as a spur to his own. The SPETS commander heartily endorsed the plan; it was brilliant and would cut the Americans to pieces. The colonel also knew that a citation from General Dracheev for the Ratmanov victory would slash his waiting time for an apartment in half. He told his battalion’s political officer, the Zampolit, that he almost felt sorry for the enemy.

  Dracheev’s assumption was that the American general would attack soon after the bombing had shot its wad — and attack quickly. The American would know that every hour he failed to breach Ratmanov’s defenses was that much more time for the Far Eastern TVD to build up Siberia’s eastern flank. Some of the chukchee members of the SPETS — men chosen for their special knowledge of the area — didn’t like General Dracheev, as he was a Yakut from central Siberia. But even so they, like the SPETS commander, had to admit — grudgingly — that he was making it easier for them. It would be nothing more than a seal hunt: all you’d have to do after is go out and club them. American cigarettes, gold teeth, watches. Burial would be the hardest job of course; the American dead would be frozen solid. No good covering them up with the. snow; come spring the stench would keep even walrus away. Best thing, the Yakuts believed, would be to burn them, but General Dracheev probably wouldn’t allow that, fuel consumption being one of his priorities. So in the end the corpses would be left to the blue foxes and the murres. The birds’d clean them to the bone come spring. And there were the golden eagles from Alaska. A feast. For the SPETS the idea of American eagles eating American dead was appealing and spawned many a joke as they waited for Freeman to take the bait.

  * * *

  Freeman, standing in his blast-protected mobile-home HQ, was dwarfed by the wall map of the Bering Sea. He donned his reading glasses and contemplated the Diomedes halfway across the funnel, showing up on the aerial recon photos as white fists thrusting up through the ice. “I’m glad you’re here, Dick,” he said, turning to welcome Colonel Richard Norton, a solidly built, amiable, at times intensely serious, five-foot-eight logistics officer and New Yorker who’d been with Freeman in Europe. But there was no time to talk over old times. Freeman told the colonel that the Siberian commander wouldn’t be caught “with his pants down” twice. “Other problem, Dick, is half these jokers don’t know a damn thing about Arctic warfare. Like those poor bastards Washington sent up to the Aleutians in forty-two in summer uniform. No wonder the Japs were all over them. I told the quartermaster this evening to make everything ready for an airborne attack on Ratmanov, jump time an hour before civil twilight. Hell, he thought I was talking about some dame called ‘Sybil.’ Then he thought it was the end of the day. So I told him, first light—”

  “Eleven oh six hours,” said Norton, taking his cap off, running his fingers through hair as gray as Freeman’s. “Sunset around seventeen forty-one?”

  “Correct. Now, Dick, I go in with the airborne at civil and exactly one hour later — earlier if we radio or fire red flares—you come in with the marine choppers.” Freeman put the glasses back on, tearing off an incoming meteorological report on the fax. Looking down over his reading glasses at Norton he said, “Didn’t think you’d be too keen on a HALO.”

  Dick Norton had a flashback to the time he’d been ordered by Freeman to fly in the back seat of an F-16B from Krefeld to Brest to hurry up air resupply from the French port for the beleaguered Fifth and Seventh American Corps and the British Army of the Rhine in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. To this day Norton could actually feel nauseated just thinking about the terrifying night flight in the supersonic fighter. Hurtling through space and you couldn’t see a damn thing and it wasn’t nearly as smooth as it appeared from the ground. Everything shook. “I’m not too keen on any kind of jump, General,” Norton replied. “You clear this with Washington?”

  “The mission? Of course.”

  “No, sir,” said Norton, looking at the map’s order of battle clustered around Galena Field from where the marines would take off. “I mean you leading the drop personally?”

  “Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, tapping the map, using his glasses as a pointer, “main problem is going to be the palletized drops — we’re going to need hundred and five millimeters. Now Rat Island’s big enough, but our guys are going to be spread all over it, jamming C-4 plastique in every goddamn crack we find. We’ll have to smoke ‘em out, same way we did with the Japs on Iwo Jima. Same situation here — they’re dug in deep. And Siberians haven’t surrendered a fight in—”

  “Except for the weather,” interjected Norton.

  “What?”

  “Same as Iwo Jima — except for the weather.”

  “Minor detail,” said Freeman, grinning.

  “You know, General, it’s minus twenty degrees over that ice pack.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Freeman, not disputing Norton’s assertion but intrigued as to how he knew the specific temperature on the pack. “I can read upside-down type, General. Remember?” Norton indicated the fax Freeman was holding. “Anchorage says the satellite cloud cover indicates twenty-mile-an-hour winds. That drops the temperature to minus forty-six.”

  “Chilly,” said Freeman. Before Norton could object further, Freeman slapped his arm on Norton’s shoulder. “Dick. You see? By God, you’re the right man for the job. No one else in this godforsaken peninsula knows that — windchill factor.” Except every Eskimo, thought Norton. “Details, Dick. You and I know that’s what wins wars.”

  “And strategy, General.”

  “That’s my department, Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, slipping his reading glasses back on. “And God’s.” There wasn’t a trace of insincerity. His right hand swept across the Bering Strait. “Speed, Dick! That’s what we need. Now we know where all those rat holes are. I’m personally going to see every one of those blown up — then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to drop high explosives down those rat holes. It’ll be surrender or the for them, Dick. White flag or beef jerky!”

  “If there are SPETS on that island, General — and Intelligence suspects there are — there’ll be no surrender.”

  “I know, Dick,” said Freeman, pausing solemnly. “I know. We won’t butcher them. I’m not a butcher. My SAS-Delta team’ll give them fair warning.” For several moments there was silence, broken only by the howling of the Arctic wind outside. “ ‘Bout two seconds. I’ve thought it through, Dick. I’ve tried to think of every da
mn detail, but I know it’s still a gamble.” He turned to look straight at Norton. “Ultimately all great victories are. Time’s against us, but I say, ‘Go!’ “

  Norton nodded, which meant that though he saw the general’s logic and the military necessity as clearly as he’d seen the giant bergs on the way over from Europe — glinting like glass castles beneath the Arctic moon — he couldn’t share in Freeman’s enthusiasm. Never had. Freeman was a warrior to the bone: brave and unapologetic in his quest for glory. All Dick Norton hoped for was that he would be alive after the war, when he would be quite happy to retire, mind and body intact. He had fought in the snows of Minsk by Freeman’s side and did not doubt the general’s determination, and SAS and Delta were the best-trained to jump from high altitudes and make pinpoint landings. Even so he wondered how many would end up on the ice flow, and how they might be the lucky ones. The normal ratio, one that Freeman well knew, dictated that an attacking force must outnumber the dug-in defenders by at least five to one. But denied the luxury of waiting, the need for speed disposed Freeman to go in now with what he had — the 140-man SAS/Delta Force team. The Pentagon boys were saying Ratmanov Island was more than an ancient wrecker of ships — it was a career disaster waiting to happen.

  * * *

  In the predawn darkness of a blizzard, two long lines of SAS/Delta troopers, seventy in each line, made their way along the tarmac at Galena air base on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula toward the gaping hold of the C-141 Starlifter.

  “Bloody lovely!” said Aussie, one of the seventy-man SAS squad. The column to his left was made up of men from the American Delta Force.

  “What are you whining about now?” asked “Choir” Williams, a fellow veteran with Aussie and David Brentwood, the leader of the SAS force, most of whose troop of twenty men had been wiped out in the Moscow raid.

  “Last week you were getting right tired of Wales,” said Choir Williams. “So the president and the prime minister say, ‘What can we do now to placate Aussie?’ and ‘ere we are!”

  “Very bloody funny,” said Aussie. “Wales in Alaska. Should’ve known better. All set to go ‘ome. Back to Sydney — up to King’s Cross. Give those sheilas a bit of the old in-out. And where are we? Freezin’ our burn off in another bloody Wales. I’m cursed with bloody Wales.”

  “Ah,” replied Choir Williams, his deep Welsh baritone barely audible now as the noise of the C-141’s pitch climbed. “You volunteered, laddie.”

  “Musta been bloody drunk!” said Aussie.

  “Anyway,” advised Williams who, like Aussie and the rest of the men lining up for the C-141, had qualified in the most gruelling Allied commando courses in the world, “you don’t want to go back to Sydney. All those girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

  “Yes, he would,” called out another Welshman. “Aussie’ll screw anything that moves, ‘e will.”

  “You oughta know, Jones,” responded Aussie.

  “Yeah?” asked Muldoon. “What’s Jonesy like, Aussie?”

  “Very nice,” said Aussie. “But too tight.”

  “Watch it!” barked the SAS sergeant major. “Officer on parade. The man himself.”

  A few turned to see Freeman, helmet down against the roar of the C-141 engines, and young David Brentwood, at five eight looking decidedly smaller than the general with whom he’d served on the Pyongyang raid.

  One of the men in the Delta Force line noted that Freeman and Brentwood looked like father and son together, but it was an illusion created by the close attention Brentwood was giving his superior as they went over last-minute details. The other illusion was that Freeman was going to jump with them. He was certainly dressed for it, in full jump suit and helmet, wrist altimeter, and oxygen mask. But if Freeman, through ordering the decoding of a scrambled message from the president requesting him not to jump, had been successful in sidestepping Mayne’s directive, he had failed to avoid an outright order from Army Chief of Staff Grey who, like Schwarzkopf’s superiors in the Iran war, viewed Freeman as being infinitely more valuable directing strategy on the ground rather than risking his neck in combat. But Grey’s instruction notwithstanding, Freeman was determined to at least go up with the SAS/D force and stoke morale before the jump. Going over the additional infrared shots from satellite pictures taken before the onset of the blizzard, Freeman and David Brentwood had ringed each of the “rat holes” that Freeman had suckered Dracheev’s SPETS into revealing.

  “Starting to snow again,” said Freeman. “Goddamn it! Well, we can’t wait, Brentwood. Another hour damn things’ll be all covered in fresh snow. Be one big white blanket over that island. Cover up the bomb scabs. Anyway, the moment we take off, Salt Lake City’s going to hit the holes with a final F-14 strike. Lasers’ll be chopped up by the snow, but they should get bombs near enough the exits to re-mark ‘em for us.” Freeman looked at his watch.”Tomcats should be halfway over the ice pack now. Remember: SAS out first, top half of Rat Island. Delta’ll take the southern half. Now our PVS-Fives—” The general meant the night vision goggles powered by a twelve-hour, three-volt lithium battery, “—are much better than anything the Siberians have, but they’ll be able to pick us up in civil twilight even if the snow keeps falling—”

  “I know, sir,” acknowledged Brentwood, not meaning to butt in, but his adrenaline was up for the jump. “I’ve told everyone in SAS/Delta. Diamond glow recognition.” It was the foot-long Velcro diamond pattern that, like the inverted V of the Allied forces in the Iraq war, would distinguish friend from foe.

  “Good!” said Freeman. “Then we’re all set.”

  By now most of the troops in the two long columns, the first men in being the last men out during the jump, were inside the cavernous interior of the Starlifter. Last man in was Brentwood. Freeman was already walking up the center of the deck, nodding cheerily as the 140 men took their seats facing one another and began to buckle up. The plane’s engines reached fever pitch as it began its lumbering run down the tarmac. It was to take off and head eastward, away from the strait, to give the big C-141 time to gain sufficient height before it turned for the high-altitude, low-opening drop. The higher altitude would give the jumpers more time to steer themselves to the assembly points on the island, the PED — palletized equipment drops — scheduled to take place ten to twenty minutes after drop zone perimeters had been secured.

  “You ready?” asked Freeman on the bullhorn.

  There was a roar that for a second could be heard above that of the plane.

  “Dumb question. Right?” hollered Freeman.

  “Right!”

  Freeman was walking down the center of the deck, holding onto the webbing net. “No need to tell you,” he told the paratroopers over the bullhorn, “how important this is. Those F-14s from Salt Lake City’ll keep the bastards’ heads down. Then we go in and whip their ass. I can assure you, gentlemen, that will send Novosibirsk a very clear message: ‘Back off! Before you all lose your ass!’ “

  There was a chorus of approval and the stamping of para boots, which annoyed the air force jumpmaster intensely. The stomping was creating a minor dust storm inside the Starlifter.

  “Well, Brentwood, we’ll have snow to contend with but least we won’t have the press. They aren’t gonna Vietnam me, Captain. All those goddamn liberal lap dogs in the press running around saying they didn’t lose us Vietnam — that the army did. Goddamn it, no one seems to realize we could have ended that war in half an hour. Two A-bombs on Hanoi would have done it. But we didn’t. We get any marks for that restraint? Not on your life. You know what would have happened, though, if those squealing bastards had been taken prisoner by the Commies. They would have wanted the U.S. Air Force to turn that place into a parking lot. Well, they’re not going to be allowed to do a Baghdad Pete on us. I’ve told the CO of that Patriot battery on Little Diomede to send that CBN son-of-a-bitch reporter and his Arctic fox headgear packing back to the mainland. They can all get pissed in Anchorage while we’re setting these
Commie bastards straight.”

  “Yes, sir,” said David Brentwood, remembering how a reporter once asked him, a thrice-decorated soldier, how he got used to it. You never did. The first moments of a battle were always as bowel chilling as the first time. Yes, you learned certain things, sensed when a firefight was more concentrated and more dangerous in one instance than in another, when there was twice as much noise as accuracy; you learned to husband your strength, ration it and not blow it all in the first few minutes; but you never got used to it.

  * * *

  “Vse gotovy?”—”All done?” asked General Dracheev.

  “Da!”

  “Kharasho!”— “Good! A little surprise for the Americans, eh?”

  “Sir?” It was the air defense duty officer. “Bandits. Looks like F-14s. Coming fast from the south. No more than a thousand feet. Trying for the exits one more time.”

  “Neuzheli? “— “Oh really?” commented Dracheev, with ill-conceived sarcasm. “I thought they’d be bringing the mail.” This got a good laugh from the SPETS commander. So even with the snow making it difficult for the F-14s to use their Smart bombs with their normal accuracy, the Americans would chop up the snow a little — maybe even buckle a few of the superhardened steel plates around the exits.

  “They’re not stupid,” said the air defense officer, trying to regain his bruised dignity. “I mean this Freeman. He will realize that some of the exits have probably not been used. That the pilots won’t see them.”

  “So?” said Dracheev. “He’ll send his men looking for them.” With that the Siberian general looked up from the dull red light of Ratmanov Control — a hundred feet of solid rock above him. “All the better then.”

  The air defense officer was even more offended, resentment growing by the second. Dracheev had obviously confided his plan only to the SPETS. Although this was normal procedure— SPETS always insisted their operations be kept as secret as possible — it still rubbed the wrong way. “Who in hell do they think they are?” the air defense officer asked his subaltern. “The elite.”