Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  In his sod house in Little Diomede’s Inalik village, the hunter, the high cheekbones of his Eskimo forebears catching the light of the golden hurricane lamp, civil twilight, before daybreak, still an hour away, puffed heavily on his walrus-bone pipe.”It’s a lot of trouble.”

  “It’s a lot of money,” countered the CBN reporter.

  The hunter took another pull of salmon jerky. The silence was broken only by the unsettling groaning of the pack ice off frozen Lopp Lagoon, north of Cape Prince of Wales. They could see the navigation light right on the point — the westernmost point of the cape, the wind coming straight off the flat ice of the lagoon in a soulful wail.

  “Well?” said the reporter impatiently, holding his hands over the Sanyo kerosene radiator, its heat waves rising like a mirage in the hunter’s sod hut. “I haven’t got all day.”

  “Cash?” said the hunter.

  “Hey, you think I carry that kind of money round with me?”

  “Yes,” said the hunter.

  A professional smile creased the reporter’s face. “How’d you know?”

  “I can smell it.”

  “Shit you can.”

  “Yes, I smell shit. But I smell money, too. Up here you don’t smell right, you the. What you see is important, too. When the-”

  “Hey,” interjected the reporter impatiently. “Time’s racing, Jack. Have we got a deal or not? Five grand now. Five when we get back.”

  The hunter was thinking. It had been a bad year. The walrus had come south in a heavy fog and gone past the islands before they knew it, so they hadn’t got the usual number to cut up and store with the murre birds — for flavor — in the frozen earth.

  “You won’t be able to show any light,” said the hunter. “Those guys in the Patriot bunkers — they could pick you up on infrared.” He thought for a moment. “Course there’ll still be a lot of heat coming up from the rest of the huts after they evacuate us. So you’d be all right in here for a while anyways.”

  “They wouldn’t be able to see the moving about in this snowfall,” said the reporter. “Cuts down the infrared signature.”

  “Maybe,” said the hunter, caught out.

  “There’s another way,” said the reporter.

  “No,” said the hunter.

  “What? You don’t even know the fucking question.”

  “Yes I do. You want to know if we could hike across to Big Diomede.”

  “It’s only two and a half, three miles,” said the reporter.

  “We could get killed.”

  “Everybody gets killed. You ever do it?” asked the reporter, fixing the hunter with a challenging stare.

  “Sure. Used to do it a lot after Gorbachev — for a while.”

  “So?”

  “It’s not a walk on an ice rink,” said the hunter. “Pressure ridges push up against one another.” He used his hands, pushing hard against one another, to demonstrate. “Ice as big as buildings.”

  “Yeah, and it can be flat, too.”

  “And how about the infrared?”

  “I told you — not if we go when it’s snowing, Jack.”

  “It’s not a hike, you know. You can get—”

  “You scared. That it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I,” said the reporter, pulling out a wad of hundreds. “I’d bury this stuff here if I were you.” He started counting. “How long will it take us — not right up on the island but off the ice floe — close enough in so we can hunker down — close enough to get some zoom shots of the airborne going in off the southern tip?”

  “Four to five hours.”

  “That long? It’s only two and a half miles, for Christ’s sakes.”

  The hunter smiled. Here was an ignorant man. What did he think it was, a walk in some park? “Hey,” he said to the reporter, “you the guy who was in Baghdad?”

  “Nope. But I’m gonna be just as famous, Jack.”

  “How you gonna send your stuff?”

  “This little baby,” said the reporter, patting a four-wire, direct satellite-link phone. “Even if I can’t get a video because of the friggin’ snow, I’ll be in by voice. Live. Let’s go!”

  The hunter agreed because he doubted that the white man could hack it, even with all the special thermal gear. Out there on the ice — with the wind it would be in the minus fifties.

  “If the ice gets too jumbled — we get a sheer cliff — we’ll have to turn back. I get half — five grand!”

  “All right,” said the reporter. “All right. Let’s get there before it’s fucking over.”

  “How do you know there’ll be an airborne attack?” asked the hunter, pulling on his sealskin boots.

  “Hey, Jack, look at the map. Doesn’t take a friggin’ genius to work that out. ‘Sides, Freeman’s the gung-ho type. Know what I mean?”

  “Impatient.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.”

  “Like you.”

  * * *

  As the C-141 turned north then westward, having gained HALO height, the men made final weapon checks. The 12.8-inch-long Heckler and Koch MP5K submachine guns were coveted by the SAS. With its nine-hundred-round-per-minute, nine-millimeter Parabellum bullets, the gun was referred to by the troopers as a “room broom”—ideally suited for the anticipated tunnel fighting. The weapon was also capable of a high, eighty-yard line-of-sight accuracy if used in the open. For the men of Delta Force, the weapon of choice was the M3A1 Colt.45 caliber submachine gun, some of its mass-produced parts honed down or replaced by hand-tooled mechanisms for greater accuracy. As a general rule, Freeman told Brentwood, he didn’t like the idea of two different ammunition sizes, preferring one that could be used by both SAS or Delta Force weapons.

  “That’s why the Brits lost Crete,” Freeman told him above the steady thunder of the C-141. “Freyberg had troops from five different countries running around with everything from point three oh three to nine millimeter. Quartermaster’s nightmare. A lot of troops — Aussies and New Zealanders — ran out of ammo. Hand-to-hand fighting, a lot of it. Could see the Nazis floating down. Sky was black with enemy chutes. Clear blue sky. Damn! What a waste of fine paratroopers. Even with the ammo screwup it was a near thing. A turkey shoot — lot of Germans dead before they hit the ground. Germans almost lost it — until Maleme was taken. Convinced the German HQ never to put their money on an airborne offensive.”

  “Christ!” said Aussie, picking up the general’s comment and turning to Choir Williams. “What the fuck are we doing here, then?”

  “Ah!” said Choir with more bravado than he actually felt. “Not to worry, laddie. Rat Island’s not Crete is it? Siberians are hiding — dug in.”

  “Oh, that’s bloody nice. Thanks for reminding me. I ‘d almost forgotten.” And then, before the Aussie’s fear could, like most of the men, force him to bear the rest of the flight in silence, he was seized by the habit that had made him famous throughout the SAS — and after the Moscow raid, throughout the entire British army. “Odds on,” he announced loudly, “that SAS’ll be first in!”

  “In where?” came a voice shouting above the ear-drumming noise.

  “In the fucking tunnels, you twit!”

  “Ahead of us?” challenged a Delta Force sergeant from Brooklyn.”Gimme a break. We’ll have coffee on ‘fore you even find your hole.”

  “Aussie knows where his hole is,” shouted an SAS.

  “Don’t be so fucking rude,” said Aussie. “Welsh bastards! Come on, you lot!” He was looking across at Delta Force. “Where’s your fuckin’ esprit de corps? How about it, boys? As you Yanks say, ‘Pay up or shut up.’ Two to one we’re down first.”

  “On the drop?” asked Brooklyn.

  “No. In the fucking tunnels!”

  “You’re on, Aussie.” Aussie whipped a stubbly indelible pencil from under his helmet and began taking the bets on a palm-sized notebook. “Right, mate. That’s the ticket.”

  “Pounds?” asked Choir Wil
liams.

  “Pounds, dollars — U.S., not Canadian — yen, deutsche marks, but—” And now Aussie, watched by Freeman, adopted a Mexican drawl, showing his teeth. “—I don’ wan’ no stinking rubles!” There was a patter of laughter, quickly lost in the plane’s huge interior, the jumpmaster landing his boot with a mud on the decking to get everyone’s attention as he stood up and announced, “Get ready!” Automatically every paratrooper, despite his heavy pack, slid forward, seemingly effortlessly, to the edge of the folded metal seats, some making last-minute adjustments to their chin straps.

  “Who is that joker?” Freeman asked Brentwood, nodding toward Aussie.

  “Australian called Lewis,” Brentwood answered. “He’d make book on the sun not rising. Took a lot of bets before the Moscow raid. Before the target was known we were doing practice jumps over Scotland. Aussie was convinced we were rehearsing for Korea, not Europe.”

  “Must have lost a bundle,” said Freeman.

  “No.”

  “How come?” asked Freeman, realizing the moment he’d asked the question what the answer was. After the Moscow raid there’d been hardly anyone left to collect.

  Across from Brentwood the Delta Force commander was looking down his line. Though the SAS stick would be first out, he was making sure that every sixth man, assigned the 5.56mm M-249 squad automatic weapon, was strapping it tightly to the equipment pack. The SAWs would be fed by the new transparent plastic magazines of two hundred rounds so the shooter could see at a glance how much ammunition remained. In addition, several of the Delta Force men carried M-203 dual purpose rifle/grenade launchers with FETS — flare, explosives, tear gas, and smoke grenade packs.

  Normally the jumpers would have been wearing the tried and trusted T-10 general-purpose drop chute, but the big twenty-eight-foot-diameter umbrella chutes couldn’t be maneuvered as well as the arching, rectangular MC1-1B chutes. The latter could be steered by pulling down the left-right riser bars above the jumper’s head, causing more air to spill on one side than the other, allowing the jumper to shoot forward at over four meters a second. In all the MC1-1Bs would make it aerodynamically a much more controllable drop, of the kind made by sports jumpers. The latter, however, as SAS/D instructors frequently pointed out, were unencumbered by 70- to 120-pound battle packs.

  The red light was on. “Stand up!” yelled the jumpmaster.

  “Stand up!” came the shouted response followed by a sound like a herd of elephants rising with planking strapped to their flanks. Normally, with the 120-pound pack, it would have been a lot louder but even with the QAP — quick attack pack — of 70 pounds, mostly ammunition, emergency rations, radio and grenades, it was still an effort for the 140 paratroopers.

  “Hookup!”

  There was sudden, tension-splitting laughter punctuated with a few catcalls. The huge rear ramp went down, and had it not been for the dimly lit interior, the jumpmaster’s face would have appeared as bright as a Day-Glo buoy. So used to the massed jumps of the 101st Airborne and the static line used during most drops, he had forgotten for a split second that it was a HALO jump — free fall. Each paratrooper would dive head first, falling at 130 feet per second until, no more than two and a half minutes from jump-off, each man would pull a rip cord at two and half thousand feet above the island, steering the double-ply nylon air foil canopy to the snow-covered target.

  The green light was on.

  “Go!”

  The shock of the cold hit Brentwood’s face with the force of a body blow, and for a split second it was déjà vu, going down over Moscow, only this time the scream of the wind was louder, the cold already penetrating the double thermal suit, the oxygen mask fogging the infrared goggles momentarily. His arms were hard against his sides, his feet up behind him, forcing his head down to counter the tendency to spin. The air screamed like a banshee around the bulbous headgear. It was a third larger than the usual helmet in order to accommodate the starlight goggles, creating more resistance than usual. Now he was pulling his left arm and leg in unison, in tighter to his center line, the maneuver giving him left drift.

  Far below him he spotted a flash of light through the goggles, light which he took to be the last of the Tomcat’s bombs, and used it as an aiming point. Several seconds later he felt the shock wave of the explosion hitting him. A fierce crackling invaded the echo chamber of his helmet as radio silence was broken by the C-141, General Freeman shouting, “Mission aborted… mission aborted… field…” The rest was a surge of static. What the hell? Brentwood knew that by now most of the SAS stick would be out of the plane, possibly even one or two of the Delta force. He looked at the altimeter, couldn’t make it out for a second, then saw he was less than a minute away from two and a half thousand feet. Then he glimpsed a bluish white dot, two of them, flitting by a thousand feet below him like tiny fireflies, and guessed, correctly, that it was one of the twin-engined Tomcats, probably on afterburner. It was split-second timing by the navy but cutting it a bit fine all the same.

  Then the unfinished part of the message he’d received from the C-141 made sense, hitting him with the force of a high explosive shock wave as he saw orange pinpoints of light, like flashlights switching quickly on and off beneath the dim blanket of snow, racing up at him from the northern part of the island. The “field” in the radio transmit must be “minefield,” set off by the Tomcat’s bombs. The C-141 had broken radio silence to tell Brentwood and the other SAS already speeding down toward the island that Ratmanov had been seeded with mines. The whole island was a minefield. More splotches of light, white swellings on the infrared’s green background, confirmed it. Worse — by now the snow would have covered any footprints, giving no clue to the pattern of mines laid — if there was any — nor indicating the positions of the rat holes. The Siberians had had at least an hour to—

  There was another surge of static in his helmet from the C-141. But now all he could pick up was “… abort… abort…” and all he could see was the snow field becoming wider and wider as he neared touchdown. Had the mines been scattered willy-nilly, or were they, in SPETS fashion, laid so as to funnel attackers into deadly triangulated COF—”cones of fire”? But no matter how the mines had been laid, David knew the Allied paratroopers — mostly, if not all, SAS — would find themselves unable to move, forced to fight and the where they landed.

  For a split second David thought of increasing the leftward drift and heading out over the cliffs for the relative safety of the ice floe. He’d save himself, but he’d be no use to anyone else. The altimeter showed he was at three thousand feet, two thousand nine hundred… In three and a half seconds he’d be at twenty-five hundred. Pull the cord or drift eastward, away from the island?

  He pulled the rip cord, heard the snap, felt the sudden deceleration, and tugged hard on the right toggle, feeling that side of the chute curl and brake as he went into a tight, controlled spiral, the sky around him alive now with lazy arcs of red and white tracer, the air exploding with the rattle and bang of AA fire, the screams as men died in the harness and the pop of flares adding to the cacophony of sound. Suddenly all was bright. A moment of civil twilight; then the flare dropped away from him. He could hear bursts of machine-gun fire like paper tearing. Quickly he paid out the fifteen-foot-long tether line attached to his equipment bundle, evening the pull on both toggles, his heart threatening to burst out of his chest. Below he could see long, black shadows piercing a white, flare-lit circle of snow.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The fax traffic, preferred by many MVD offices over the regular military channels, was informing Novosibirsk HQ that at this very moment, at 10:03 a.m. Thursday morning — that is, 11:03 a.m. Wednesday on little Diomede, only two and a half miles across the date/boundary line between the U.S. and USSR — with a half hour to go before the Bering Strait passed out of utter darkness into civil twilight, an Allied airborne attack was underway against Ratmanov Island.

  Another fax, classified as tayna— “secret”— but momentarily c
onsidered less important to Novosibirsk HQ than the American general’s attack on Ratmanov, came through with the information that the submarine that had attacked the two supertankers off America’s northwest coast had reported that one of the torpedoes it had fired had not exploded, a common-enough complaint from the Far Eastern TVD HQ at Khabarovsk. Normally this would merely have been entered as a nerazorvavshiysya snaryad— “dud”— but it was seen by an alert intelligence officer at Novosibirsk who realized that it was opening up an old sore for Khabarovsk TVD HQ — the suspected sabotage of munitions by Jews living in one of the YAOs, or Jewish autonomous regions — in this case a lamb chop-shaped Jewish enclave, 120 miles at its widest, around Birobidzhan. A hundred and fifteen miles west of Khabarovsk, the Jewish region was near the Manchurian border.

  * * *

  In Khabarovsk, KGB chief Colonel Nefski had just returned from the Bear Restaurant having downed an enormous plate of pig’s feet, fresh bread, and wine served by an elderly waiter whose atrocious French lent an air of sophistication whenever Nefski and other senior officers patronized the restaurant. But if Nefski could be fooled by pretensions of French cuisine, there wasn’t much anyone could tell him about the best way to deal with suspected saboteurs. Gorbachev, of course, had vsyo is-portil—”ballsed everything up”—so that even after he had gone and things started to return to something like normal around Khabarovsk there were still idiosyncratic pockets of bureaucracy so that, for example, before he could have “absolute” authority to deal with the Jews it was necessary to get Novosibirsk’s approval. No one would have questioned him had he gone ahead with his own plan, but Nefski knew how pieces of paper not obtained could be used later against one by unscrupulous political opponents. Gorbachev and that other fool, Yeltsin — God rot them — had actually encouraged the Jews for a time to believe they had the same rights as any other Soviet citizen.

  As Nefski waited impatiently by the window of his third-floor office for confirmation that his fax had gotten through to Novosibirsk, he took another Sobraine from his cigarette tin and lit it, pouring the acrid, bluish-gray smoke against the frosted windows through which he could faintly see the red-and-yellow tram cars making their way in the blizzard along Khabarovsk’s wide avenues. One’s position, he ruminated to his subaltern, was all a matter of distance from the capital. First, Moscow. Now, Novosibirsk. Like the Americans who lived in Alaska and the American Northwest who were never understood by Washington’s bureaucrats, Nefski had ample evidence that Novosibirsk never understood the tyranny of distance, never fully appreciated the enormous implications of the fact that the lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed barely fifty miles from the Chinese border out here.