Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  At the top of the shaft David Brentwood was yelling, “Half with me, half stay topside. Watch the other exits!” Brentwood knew that most of these rat holes would already be warped, even if they’d not been actually penetrated by the air strikes, and would therefore be effectively unopenable by the SPETS. Still, the Siberians would need only one or two exits to enable them to swarm up again. Even now the ten-man Delta squad deployed on the rim were readying to stave off any counterattack by ad hoc teams of SPETS who, having made their way along the cliff tops north and south of the rocky depression, were now attempting to head back to try and retake the R1 basin.

  In the basin a medic, readying to give Freeman a shot of antitetanus, almost finished what the Siberians had begun, barely seeing Freeman’s tetanus allergy bracelet in time as the general groggily regained consciousness long enough to give Brentwood an order.

  “Yes, sir!” responded Brentwood, looking around, yelling, “Radio!” He had to call again before he saw a whip aerial swinging wildly like a fishing rod through the clearing smoke and fumes that were still issuing from R1. “They still have us jammed?” he asked the radio operator.

  “Yes, sir. All static.”

  “All right. Get to the cliff top. Aussie, you cover him. Take two more with you.” Brentwood turned to the radio man. “Use your lamp if you can’t get a frequency. Signal Little Diomede for the MEU to come in. They’ll pass it on. Four Apaches attacking first, the transports to follow fifteen minutes later, coming down on the other exits. But no spreading out — just secure the exits. There are still minefields on our flanks.” Brentwood tossed down two more three-second SAS “specials”—stun grenades of the kind SAS had used to clear the Iranian Embassy in London of terrorists in 1980. Stepping back quickly from the cover, he heard Aussie telling him, “Cliff AAs are still active. They’ll blow the MEU Apaches to pieces.”

  “Do what I tell you!” shouted Brentwood. “Take another two men with you.” Within seconds two more Delta commandos were moving with Aussie up toward the rim to cover the rear right and left flanks of the signal operator, whose lamp was blinking eastward where anyone but the Siberians could see it. Dick Norton’s scopes on Cape Prince of Wales spotted it the second it began winking — the radio relay from Little Diomede’s Patriot battery not needed.

  * * *

  As the four AH-64s were taking off and heading out over the jagged twenty-five-mile ice flow toward Ratmanov, their Hughes gunbelts fully loaded and rocket pods resupplied, Delta Force and SAS were in their element, doing what they had trained months, in some cases years, to do. Every man of them was highly trained in a cross section of skills, and every one was in top physical shape. Eighteen headed north of the basin to carry out Freeman’s order; twenty-seven headed south, where the AA fire from the recessed, rail-mounted batteries had been heaviest. Map references from the fighter aircrafts’ largely futile attacks on the recessed AA positions were of some help, but the references couldn’t be relied upon to any high degree.

  “Clever bastard!” quipped Aussie to the radio man, but the latter didn’t answer, his concentration eastward, lips moving with his Morse message. When he’d received the acknowledgment blink from across the pristine air of the strait he noticed shadows, scattered clouds sliding ominously across the ice pack. “Who’s a clever bastard?” he asked Aussie. Aussie fired a long burst at a SPETS who, looking the worse for wear, was dodging between rocky outcrops thirty yards down from the basin’s rim. The SPETS stopped then fell, twisting about, trying to reach his backpack. He slithered down into a pocket of dirty ice, streaked by FAE detritus.

  “Who’s a clever bastard?” repeated the radio man. “Brentwood?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, him too. But I meant the old man.”

  “Von Freeman,” grunted one of the Delta men, who’d lost two of his best buddies when the general had called in the FAE strike.

  “Okay,” said Aussie. “He’s a rough customer, but this is a smart move, boyo!”

  “You hope.”

  Aussie thought he saw the SPETS move in the snow — or was it a sense of movement created by passing cloud? “Five to one on it works,” he whispered, clipping in another mag, not taking his eyes off the SPETS but not wanting to waste ammunition either.

  “You mean what he told Brentwood?” said the Delta man.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s five to one on?” asked the American to his right.

  “He means,” said the radio man, “you bet ten bucks to win one.”

  “Fuck you,” said the other Delta man matter-of-factly.

  “Hey, hey,” said Aussie, adopting a quiet yet schoolmasterish tone, still not taking his eyes off the SPETS. “Watch your language. Three to one on.”

  “Done.”

  There was an explosion so violent that it shook ice from the cliff top, sending it on a sheer fell sixteen hundred feet straight down, where it shattered like glass on the floe.

  “Christ, what was that?” said Aussie. There was a towering pall of smoke above R1 seventy yards behind them and the stink of human ordure.

  “C-four,” the radio man said quietly, his dull monotone suppressing his fear, so determined not to overreact he hardly seemed to react at all. “Brentwood must have dropped a whole—” He stopped, and the others knew why, for it might well have been a SPETS-induced explosion. Taking his eyes off the SPETS, Aussie glanced back toward the middle of the basin, the towering black column of smoke now hundreds of feet in the air.

  * * *

  Because Joe Mell’s Skidoo conked out — he’d had to clean the plugs and tinker with the carburetor to get it going again — it was civil twilight when he reached the snake. Mumbling that he should have “used the dogs” instead, he cinched the belt charge securely about the four-foot-diameter pipe, took another swig of Southern Comfort, and pushed the button.

  They found bits of him as far as two hundred yards away, untouched by the inferno that followed the explosion: the charge had not ignited the oil until it raised the temperature of the crude gushing out of the pipe to its flash point. Forensic analysis of the molecular structure of dime-sized pieces from the charge’s casing recovered by disc metal detectors confirmed what Anchorage FBI had been quick to surmise — namely that the material was of Soviet manufacture and that there had been no timer, a guarantee that Joe Mell, identified by dental records, would never be able to identify Chernko’s Alaskan sleeper.

  Only twelve minutes elapsed between Joe Mell’s attack and the two other points of sabotage — one on the North Slope itself, the third at Valdez depot, where the crude was now afire and fouling the pristine beauty of Prince William Sound, huge globular tarballs of unrefined “mousse” crude suffocating every sea creature in their path. The fire at the spill’s periphery was so fierce that it split the ice-cold fir trees lining the sound, their sharp “cracks” heard for miles along the frozen shore.

  The environmental catastrophe that was fouling the waters and killing thousands of animals, from seabirds who had become trapped upon landing in the sludge to marmots hibernating in the Brooks Range, enraged environmentalists from Nome to Washington. What would cause the lights of Congress to burn late into the winter night, however, was the stunning realization that the United States — its consumption of fuel in the war five times normal usage — now had its vital oil artery cut.

  The pipeline could be mended within a week, but with the Middle East wells afire, the awful vulnerability of the pipeline and of the tankers shipping the oil from Valdez meant that most of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines would have to be deployed to protect the 1,900-mile-long tanker route from Valdez to Cherry Point, Washington to Point Conception in California. This meant drastically reducing the number of submarines available to the Pacific Fleet for action in and about the Aleutians and in America’s ability to interdict the Siberian resupply routes from Vladivostok, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Island bases.

  The only positive thing about the situation as far as the Pentagon was concerned
was that the few peace protesters around the White House now dried to a trickle. Even those who advocated the United States should let the Siberians have their way could not stomach what the Siberians had done to the pipeline. You could kill a marine, but not a marmot.

  Commander in Chief Pacific immediately requested Alaska Air Command to increase chopper patrols over the pipeline and ordered all available subs from Bangor, Washington, to the testing range at Beck Island in Behm Canal, twenty-four miles north of Ketchikan on the Alaskan Panhandle. They were to make ready for increased patrols up and down the West Coast, the chief of naval operations now convinced that with the pipeline under tighter surveillance, the weak points in the vital supply link would be the natural attack lanes between the offshore islands all down the coast, particularly those from Valdez to Vancouver Island in British Columbia to the San Juans off Washington State.

  CINCPAC’s orders sent another of the Brentwood brothers-Robert, the eldest — into action. His dual purpose ICBM/attack sub, a Sea Wolf II, the USS Reagan, dipped her moorings at Bangor, Washington, within hours of the Alaska pipeline having been severed. Heading out for another seventy-day war patrol off the West Coast of North America, her “blue” crew was not happy. Being submariners — men who, in order to accommodate all the gadgetry of modem warfare, were forced to live in confined spaces that would have driven landlubbers into a neurotic frenzy in two weeks — they were not whiners. But during their refit and testing runs on the range, they had been within a week of being relieved by the sub’s “gold” crew. The nuclear reactor of the Reagan produced so much power, so much fresh water, that the overflow had to be jettisoned every day. It was the men who wore out first, not ship’s supplies.

  One deck below the control room, the missile warfare officer was moving slowly through the red light of “Blood Alley,” batteries of computers on either side of him winking green, red, and amber in response to his testing, his earphones trailing cord as he and Petty Officer Patrick went through a dry run. The captain, like most of his Annapolis-bred ilk, was wont to give orders for a launch any time during the long night of a patrol. You never knew, the officer informed the newcomer Patrick, whether it was for real or not until the last thirty seconds.

  “Keeps us on our toes,” said the MWO. The petty officer had another phrase for it, but he was a petty officer because, along with his efficiency, he knew when to keep quiet in the silent service. Besides, he had learned that Brentwood was considered a fair man by the crew — the quiet, shy type — though lord help the crewman who screwed up. In the world of the Soviet Alfa II, not as quiet but faster than the Sea Wolf, a split second either way meant life or death.

  * * *

  The cliff face erupted in gun and surface-to-air missile fire. The Apaches flew in zigzagging attack pattern, but it didn’t help them. Two-thirds of the way across the twenty-five-mile floe, one of them erupted in flame then disintegrated. The SAM-10 on the retractable launcher took only thirty seconds to slide to the cliff opening — a pinhole from where the choppers were— and unleash the missile that even the nimble firefly-evasive tactics of the Apaches couldn’t shake. But the rolling smoke from the cliff base, as Freeman had anticipated in his order to David Brentwood, told the men whom Brentwood had deployed south and north of R1 along the cliff face precisely where the SAM opening was, as well as that of the medley of other AA weapons whose assorted fire the remaining three Apaches were drawing.

  David Brentwood and Aussie Lewis strapped their ice cleats onto their vapor barrier boots, preparing to “visit,” in the SAS lexicon, the AA position nearest R1. A SAM “hole” had surprised Aussie and the Delta radio man when it opened up, seemingly only yards away but in fact a hundred feet almost directly below them. Aussie quickly staked the piton for his white nylon ply line, took the strain in his left hand glove, and abseiled in a controlled hop/fall down the wall of the cliff, another Delta man having taken his place to guard the radio man from any landward attack by the SPETS.

  For a moment Brentwood was worried that his ice cleats would be heard cutting into the cliff face but just as quickly forgot about it as he went over the lip into the sustained roar of the Siberians’ ZSU — quads — throwing out their tracer and the din of the SAM’s flashback in its man-made cave. Aussie was abseiling down the cliff on the other side of the SAM hole, thirty feet from Brentwood.

  From his vantage point on the island’s southernmost end, the CBN reporter could see the dots of the three Apache helicopters and the cliff coming alive through the smoke, but because there was so much smoke, particularly the exhausts from the SAMs, whose breath immediately turned the frigid air to fog, the zoom on his Sony 5000 video camera was useless. “We’ve got to get closer,” he told the hunter urgently.

  “Through minefields? No way. You’d better signal a chopper ride if those troop whirlybirds make it back again.”

  “You’ve got an SOS flare haven’t you?” shot back the newsman.

  “So? That’s for emergencies.”

  “What the hell do you call this? Moment you see those troop Chinooks going in, you pull that tab.”

  “You divert a chopper just so you can get pictures, man, you’re gonna be in a lot of shit.”

  “I’ll take the rap. It’s worth another grand.”

  “Okay,” agreed the hunter, “I’ll fire the flare, but I’m staying here. I don’t like those whirlybirds. I’d rather walk back to—”

  “All right, all right,” said the CBN reporter, anxiously looking through the eyepiece again. “Damn that smoke!” Now and then he could see white dots moving against the black cliff where one of the earlier and unsuccessful air attacks had blasted the ice off, exposing the black basalt beneath.

  Had it not been for the smoke the reporter would have seen at least twenty dots: seven two-man teams and six individuals abseiling down the cliff face. Apache fire killed half a dozen of the Delta/SAS commandos as shrapnel ricocheted across the race. It killed two commandos outright; others lost their footing or had their lines severed and fell down on the floe. Aussie, Brentwood, and the other teams ignored everything else, focusing only on the particular rat hole below them on the cliff face.

  At ninety-five feet, which had taken them less than a minute to reach, Brentwood and Aussie were above the SAM site, either side of it. None of the twenty commandos had used grenades but rather lumps of C-4 plastique with three-second detonator/fuses. They didn’t want to simply snuff out the operating crews but knock the AA batteries and SAM transoms right off their rails, hopefully bringing down the rock ceiling as well.

  Two commandos were spotted by SPETS loaders who had gone forward, right to the sheer dropoff of their cave’s ledge, in order to clear rock and ice debris shaken loose by the vibration of their own firing. It was also the only place to get a draft of fresh, ice-cool air now that the ventilators that had kept the weapon bays clear of smoke weren’t up to capacity due to Freeman’s and Brentwood’s attack on the R1 basin. But the remaining eighteen Allied commandos did the job, each man in the seven two-man teams tossing in the C- 4 simultaneously. Only one missed falling, the charge exploding at the seven-hundred-foot level, sending up ice shards, some over six feet long, that caught the cloud-filtered sun before they shattered, killing two of the remaining six individual line commandos as the Delta/SAS team hauled themselves back up the cliff.

  Dracheev’s force, however, paid a much heavier price: seventeen of the eighteen holes or caves were hit, wiped out, AA quad mountings and SAM launchers blown off their rail mounts, inclining roofward or pointing at the ice floes at ridiculously inoperable angles. They were too heavy to manhandle back onto the rails — the latter buried in any case by collapsing rock piles and scaffolding.

  From a distance it looked like a dust storm was issuing forth from the cliff, the rush of black and white rock — now gravel-pouring down the cliffs like molten waterfalls plunging to the ice floe fifteen hundred feet below, the air steaming up as if volcanic vents had been unzipped all along the cli
ff’s base, the bodies of some of the more than fifty-three SPETS, AA, and missile crews momentarily visible in the Allied-made avalanche.

  * * *

  “Let the up, goddamn it!” ordered Freeman, getting up off the litter. “I’m all right.”

  “General, you took a bad fall. Concussion sometimes doesn’t—”

  “Let the up!”

  It delayed the takeoff of the Apache chopper, which had been turned into an air ambulance heading back to Cape Prince of Wales. It was now sprouting two litters for wounded on either side.

  At the moment when his control room shivered, photographs splintering from the enormous shock waves of the Allied charges on the cliff, Major General Dracheev knew his garrison was defeated. His SPETS would fight to the death if asked, but it would be nothing more, he told his duty officer, than apodpolnaya boynya— “underground abattoir.”

  It was impossible to get a message through the jammed hub of wounded up to R1 and so, tearing off a piece of his bed sheet, sticking it on the bayonet of an AK-74, he personally made his way through the choking dust of the tunnel leading out to the nearest AA gun emplacement.

  Weaving his way carefully through the burning remnants of what had been a ZSU quad, he saw the bodies of its crew, or rather what was left of them, cast about the tunnel so violently that it only added to his resolve. The stench of human ordure mixed with the sulfurous stench of the C-4’s aftermath and incinerated guano, hitherto frozen by the ice, almost overwhelmed him. Dracheev saw two Apaches, now alarmingly big, passing up then out of sight above the cliff. “Hello!” he called from the tunnel, his voice echoing out from the cliff as he disgustedly thrust out the AK-74, the white sheet slapping stiffly in the breeze.