by Ian Slater
Despite increasing, almost hysterical AA fire, the second Tomcat released its single 12,573-pound “Big Blue 82” fuel air explosive mixture of gelled ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap. The canards afforded it some stability in the fierce wind gusting about the cliff tops, but not much. A hundred feet above the minefields, its cloud detonators released, allowing the slurry of gelled explosive to blow out of the casing; it became a vast aerosol, or chemical mist, over the snow.
At twenty-three feet above the ground the cloud detonators ignited the now lethal explosive/air mix, wind gusts having pushed it sharply westward. The vast “in-curling” flame, over two hundred yards long and over a hundred yards wide, immediately killed over forty of the fifty-six SAS.
It was not the FAE’s ferocious heat or terrible overpressure or the detonation of all the mines in the area in one cataclysmic upwelling of black, rock-streaked snow that killed the SAS commandos, but asphyxiation. The flames instantly consumed all oxygen in the area, and in the process sucked every last bit of air from the trapped men’s lungs. Over seventy-three SPETS suffered the same fate, the heat and shock wave felt through the canopy of the following Tomcat that, dropping its Big Blue, killed another eleven SAS troopers, leaving only sixteen scattered further inland and several, like Brentwood and Aussie, to the south.
The second FAE did not kill any more SPETS but flooded ventilator shafts with fire, so that now more than a thousand SPETS were assembling beneath the Rl shaft. Their imminent exit was due not only to the befouled ventilation system but to their desire to combat the troops that were certain to be aboard the more than one hundred specks now showing up on Ratmanov radar — Apache gunships preceding a larger armada of over 15 °Chinook CH-47 troop transport choppers. Dracheev was in a rage; not only had this Freeman had the courage to call in FAEs near his own men, so destroying SPETS minefields, but had used the FAEs to clear landing space for a helicopter assault. Well, it wasn’t over yet.
* * *
“Flames still visible,” reported the Starlifter’s copilot.
“Okay,” acknowledged the pilot. “We go around again. Tell Freeman.”
“Roger.” There was an explosion at two o’clock high — either a Fulcrum or an Eagle, it was impossible to tell.
* * *
The next time around the flames had abated, partially because of the snow and the arrival of a bevy of rain-heavy squalls coming in over the pressure ridges in excess of a hundred miles an hour. Freeman was first out, diving toward the now-blackened drop zone. The rest of the Delta stick came behind him, hoping that the squalls would pass well over the island; otherwise they’d have one hell of a job steering into the cleared area. Two Delta men were already dead, one sucked into the starboard engine of a MiG-29 going down, the other man struck seconds later by the same plane’s canopy, his skull crumpling the cockpit’s Perspex, momentarily turning it cherry red before the froth of brain was consumed by the blizzard. Another MiG-29, having broken radar silence in the final moments of his attack, and frustrated by not having found the big Starlifter, glimpsed the unmistakable wing sweep of a Tomcat. But the Tomcat vanished before he could fire an Alamo or Apex.
Freeman was pulling hard, lowering the left toggle, going into a spiral. The drop point he had picked up in the eerie blue of civil twilight held three charred bodies — SAS or SPETS he didn’t know, but at least it would be clear of mines. There were several bright orange flashes a mile or so east of the cliffs and then a roll of explosions echoing off the cliff face: three Chinook choppers hit by Rat AA fire.
Freeman’s landing was softer than he’d braced for. His right foot passed through the black crackle of one of the corpses. The only solids left by the blaze were bone, ammunition clips — their rounds set off by the fire — a partially melted Kevlar helmet that told him it had been a Special Air Service trooper, and a Heckler and Koch submachine gun nearby. The air was pungent with the sickening-sweet odor of burnt flesh. Freeman saw his equipment pack in a black, oily pool where SAS and others — he guessed SPETS — lay charred beyond recognition, one tightly stretched, leatherlike face staring eyeless at the sky.
Already Freeman was under fire, the pyrotechnics of intercutting red and white tracer against the Prussian blue of a now spectacularly clear Arctic morning mixing with orange streaks from the marine expeditionary unit’s assault Apache as 2.75-inch-diameter rockets, fired in salvos, exploded against the high, dug-in cliff guns, followed by the skittering orange/red detonations of the ninety-five-pound anti-radar Hellfire missiles. In the distance writhing, smoking, umbilical trails of red-hot spent casings spun down from the Apaches’ 750-round-a-minute, belly-mounted Hughes gun, adding to the deadly kaleidoscope of colors passing through and blending with one another against the vast bluish-white tumble of the ice-bound strait — the thin squiggle of Siberia’s mountainous coast just visible twenty-five miles westward.
The CBN reporter on the southern tip of the island, two miles south of where the FAEs had scoured out a safe landing zone for Delta Force, was on a high, getting pics now as well as the clearest sound bites he’d ever heard, better than anything he’d gotten in the Iraqi war.
A wounded SPETS snapped off a burst in Freeman and Morgan’s direction. Having shucked his chute, Freeman instinctively went on his belly, reaching in the black ashes of one of the corpses for the dead man’s MP5K. The gun fired, and the SPETS rolled into Morgan’s burst, shuddered, and lay dead even before the white flecks of his overlay, torn out by the nine-millimeter Parabellum, had fallen to the ground.
Freeman, the MP5K cradled in his elbows, began a fast belly crawl toward his pack ten yards in front of him when he saw two SPETS, one hauling a light machine gun, its bipod swinging, momentarily silhouetted against the azure sky at the cliffs edge, the latter’s sharp black thrust of rock clearly visible now the snow had been melted by the FAE’s explosion. Freeman fired again; now Morgan was close in beside him.
The SPETS made it across the gap in the rock, splinters of basalt flying high, catching the sun. Freeman patted the MP5K he’d dug out from the ashes. “By God those Krauts make ‘em good, Harry.” But now the gun’s magazine, he knew, was nearly empty, and only a yard or two from the pack he used the tether line to bump it over a pile of shale, tearing out the Winchester 1200. Knowing he had the lead slug in the spout, he told Morgan to lead. The submachine gun was better able to sweep the SPETS’ position than Freeman’s lead slug, which was intended for steel doors and the like. The Delta major clipped in a new mag.
Having seen the Delta Force landing, Brentwood and Aussie and two other SAS had intended to join them, but with a sprawling half mile of snow, no doubt mined, between them and the Delta drop zone, the best the three SAS men could do was to try to work their way up along the line of the cliff where there were no mines but plenty of SPETS.
The idea was quickly abandoned, however, upon their sighting the MEU’s choppers coming straight for the cliffs, albeit on a vector a hundred feet or so below the top of the seventeen-hundred-foot-high cliffs. Once they saw the choppers — AH-64 Apaches out front, the cliff taking a lot of hits, much of the shrapnel whizzing above them — the SAS men knew the chopper force, despite all the best intentions in the world, could not avoid overshoots of friendly fire. The choppers were forcing the SPETS aboveground to keep their heads down — likewise the few survivors of the SAS, the air now literally singing with warhead fragments. The whole idea had been for Norton and the marines to come in and secure the island after the SAS-Delta Force had “cleared the rats’ nest,” in Freeman’s happy phrase.
“Little ahead of schedule,” said Aussie wryly, keeping his head well down, waiting for the marines to sweep in. “Hope to Christ those leathernecks don’t blast away at us.”
Aussie wasn’t alone in his estimation of the operation. A quarter-mile north in Freeman’s drop zone, Brooklyn, another trooper, declared the operation “FUBAR”—fucked up beyond all recognition — as he hunkered down by an ice-veined ro
ck a hundred yards from the Rl exit that Freeman and Morgan were now moving toward, Morgan calmly ejecting one mag and inserting the other in a smooth, three-second change that would have done any drill instructor proud.
The approaching choppers were no longer the size of gnats but football-sized as they began to rise for the final “hop stop” over the jagged lip of the cliff tops into the big FAE-cleared strip now occupied by Delta and being fiercely contested by SPETS who were oozing out of the R1 exit at an alarming rate. In fact, thanks to the FAE’s ancillary benefit of having overwhelmed the ventilator filters, there were still over a thousand SPETS filling the tunnels leading to the bottom of the R1 shaft, eager to join their comrades above.
But the SPETS heading for R1 were now the victims of their own ingenuity, for to use R2 would be to split their forces, the southern contingent boxed in by the minefields they had sown on the lower half of the island to help trap the enemy paratroops. General Dracheev, although surprised by Freeman’s coldblooded daring in ordering the FAE drops though it risked the lives of his own men, now almost wished that Freeman had ordered in more FAE strikes to the south to clear a wider defense area for his own men now that R1 was so overcrowded. SPETS were pouring out into the thirty-foot-diameter rock basin that bulged protectively from the exit on the landward side of the cliff.
A Delta Force spotter, fifty yards to Freeman’s left and on slightly higher ground, saw the SPETS come streaming out and tried to get a radio man to tell Freeman he’d seen at least thirty of the enemy exit in just over a minute. The spotter killed three of them before he’d been forced back from higher ground by fire from an RPK 7.62-millimeter light machine gun, too far away to toss his grenades. But the SPETS jamming was still effective, and the radio man couldn’t get the message through to Freeman. Instead, a runner was dispatched — and cut down before he’d gone five paces.
The frustration of the seventy-plus SAS/Delta Force survivors, of men trained for lightning-fast IKO — in-kill-out — action, but who, because of the minefields, had been bottled up, forced into open-ground warfare without the assist of heavy mortars and the like, manifested itself in Freeman. He now saw the choppers getting smaller, Norton having presumably seen that despite all the noise and thunder of ordnance being thrown at the cliff face, most of the dug-in AA batteries were still intact, putting up a wall of lead that had already created seven gaping holes in the chopper line of attack. Norton had obviously decided that to take the marines in would have been nothing less than suicidal. It was a call he’d have to square with Freeman, if Freeman survived, but it was his call.
“Two oh three!” yelled Freeman, his shout immediately attracting AK-47 fire, albeit inaccurate, the SPETS probably on the move deploying a defensive line. Morgan and others responded to their fire immediately in an enfilade of semiautomatic fire erupting from the C-shaped Delta Force line, whose northern and southern arcs spread out left and right of Freeman. This time the sustained firing of Delta Force successfully covered the ten-yard dash by one of the two Delta men equipped with an M-203, in effect an eleven-pound M-16A2 rifle with a circular-ribbed, forty-millimeter-diameter grenade launcher — a replacement for the old M-16A1’s forestock — with the 5.56-millimeter mag serving as the handgrip when pulling the trigger of the launcher. “You figure that basin of theirs is about thirty, fifty yards from here?” Freeman asked the commando.
“Split the difference, General — forty.”
“Suits me, son. Lob six of those babies right in there. Start with HE and alternate with smoke and tear gas canisters. One after the other, son, quick as you can and we’ll have a fuckin’ rat trap sooner’n you can fart!” Freeman turned to Morgan, who was firing another burst on the other side of the M-203. “Henry, get your flank ready. Hand signals. Gas masks on. We go on ten.”
“Go on ten. Got it.” A loud bang stunned Freeman, the SPETS bracketing them with heavy mortar, and even as he was signalling the crescent of Delta men on his right to ready for an attack on ten, he couldn’t hear anything but buzzing in his ears, as if they were covered by a mass of wasps. Then he lost sight of his men, a thick cloud of tear gas enveloping both Delta flanks — from where he couldn’t tell. Through the buzz he heard the crash of the first grenade in the basin, said, “Good shooting!” but couldn’t hear himself, and was struck by the terrible thought that the SPETS, many of whom he knew were trained in English, might have picked up his shouted commands. Whether the tear gas fired at them had been a coincidence or was their own, backblasted by a change in the wind, he couldn’t tell. Either way he knew he had no choice. He heard a second explosion, this one clanging, the HE grenade shrapnel ringing in the rock basin. There were screams of men hit, his or theirs he couldn’t tell. Another grenade went off, then more — coming from the SPETS. He tried to look through the smoke but could see nothing. Next moment it cleared. Morgan fired, and there was a soft, red explosion — blood — no more than twenty feet away. The SPETS shooter slumped, not making a sound, his nose and right cheek missing. Freeman brought his wristwatch close to his face: nine seconds. Grasping the Winchester tightly he yelled, “Go!”, the sound of his voice coming to him as if in the distance, through a long pipe.
* * *
La Bataille du Bassin—The Battle of the Basin, as the French papers were later to describe it — was not, as the headline suggested, some vast, sprawling engagement in the Arctic but it was fierce and unyielding to the seventy-plus Delta/SAS men who charged, following Freeman, through the tear gas screen to engage the enemy in a swirling, smoke-filled cauldron of firefights. The sounds of the battle reverberated off the rocky amphitheater as Americans, British, and Siberians closed hand-to-hand after exhausting their magazines and when the attacking Delta/SAS Force was so near the Siberians that further fire endangered their own men.
Morgan and Freeman were side by side as they reached the rocky basin’s rim. Freeman had no option but to fire the lead slug, a metal projectile punching through three SPETS in the congested basin, blowing holes the size of sledgehammers and sending flesh and bone flying as if they themselves had exploded. Before the third SPETS fell, Freeman, a formidable sight coming through the haze of battle with his shotgun, had already pumped — Delta hands eschewing semi-automatic shotguns because of their proneness to jam — one of the four flechette cartridges into the barrel and fired, then another, then another— in all, sending out 180 grek- or polyethylene-bedded steel darts in an expanding cone that killed at least six SPETS outright, injuring another half dozen or more.
Seven Delta Force fell under sustained AK-47 fire from the SPETS who, a moment before Freeman fired, had been a compact mass about the R1 exit. A shouted order from among the SPETS preceded the closing, or rather the attempted closing, of the R1 manhole. But by now another Delta commando had fired his lead-slug-loaded shotgun from only ten feet away and with a deafening ring, akin to the sound of some enormous bell being hammered, the steel manhole cover, once cold and therefore undetected and untouched by the Allied infrared guided aerial bombardment, was now billowing smoke like some fumarole.
The warmer air of the hundred-foot-deep tunnels streaming through the ragged, baseball-sized perforation blown out by the Winchester’s slug immediately created a fog as it hit the Arctic air, adding to the confusion of the smoke-filled basin. Freeman went down, the victim of a SPETS stun grenade concussion, the Winchester clattering on the R1 cover. Brentwood’s small band of SAS survivors breached the basin’s rim to the right.
“Medic!” Morgan shouted, and then died, lungs pulped to a pink mass by an AK-74 burst at near-point-blank range. Brentwood evened the score, emptying a mag into the SPETS, punching him back into other comrades falling about him. Not pausing for a second Brentwood popped one, two, three grenades down through the hole in the R1 cover, the thumps and clanging of the explosions sending ricocheting metal zinging about amid the screaming and choking tear gas, adding to the general confusion and making it impossible to know friend from foe for at least seven seconds.
It was a relative silence in the roar of noise, and noticed only by the final group of four SAS and one Delta paratrooper who, like Brentwood and Aussie before them, had had to work more slowly than Freeman’s “cavalry” through a grenade-shovelled path in the minefield in order to reach the basin.
No one except Dracheev, in his Saddam bunker a hundred feet down and a mile away, realized what the immediate implications of the Allied grenade attack in the shaft were. One moment the Siberian commander had been watching his men moving toward the R1 shaft, the next they stopped. Within seconds he could detect the unmistakable reek of cordite and throat-searing whiffs of tear gas streaming back through the tunnels. He knew immediately that the top section of Rl must now be penetrated. In fact, the whole of R1 had been penetrated insofar as the sheer mass of bodies — some barely alive — writhing in the hellish cauldron of the top fifty feet of the R1 shaft was preventing the steel trapdoor hatch at the sixty-foot level from being closed, thus risking the integrity of the entire system, the shaft jammed with dead and dying.
