Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “No, sir, but I’m responsible for my men out there. I can’t run a MUST if half my men are killed.” Devine was pasty-faced from the effort.

  “Devane, I think you’d better leave. Dismissed!”

  “Sir,” said Devine, stepping back, saluting smartly but turning about shakily.

  For a moment Freeman was speechless; then he kicked the wastebasket so violently that editorials exploded from it. Putting his glasses on he tried to concentrate on the map of Siberia. The railway, that was the key. In ‘45 Russkies had surprised the Japanese by being able to shift four entire armies from the western front to the far eastern theater in just eight weeks, utilizing 136,000 rail cars on the Trans-Siberian. The gall of that pipsqueak captain walking in… Where the hell did he think he was? Goddamn AMA convention? He snatched the phone. “Dick!”

  “Yes, General?”

  “That runt of a captain you sent the tore a goddamn strip off me. Me! Said I was endangering his chopper crew. How d’you like that? All I wanted to do was get back in the fighting. Said I could have cost him his whole crew — medics and all. Insolent son of a bitch told the enemy only took thirty seconds to bracket.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir, what?” demanded Freeman.

  “He’s correct, General.”

  “No, he isn’t!” roared Freeman. “It’s twenty-five seconds to bracket, not thirty. Dick?”

  “General?”

  “Second that son of a bitch from MEU to my HQ. So goddamned smart he can run all the MUSTs.”

  “Beg pardon, General, but not as captain. You have to be at least a colonel.”

  “All right, make him a colonel. Field commission. No, I don’t want to hear any flak about normal channels. Remember what Von Runstedt said about normal channels, Dick.”

  “Have an idea I’m about to find out, General.”

  “A trap for officers without initiative. That Devane, he’s read-”

  “Devine, sir. Name’s Devine.”

  “Well, hell, Dick, with a name like that we’ll have to make him bishop. Walked right up to the and told the I’d screwed up. We need men like that. But Dick—”

  “Sir?”

  “Not too many.”

  “No, sir.”

  * * *

  Freeman was now studying the enlarged satellite pictures of the Kamchatka Peninsula, in particular the region about Petropavlovsk where the enemy had built bombproof sub pens in the nineteen-eighties for forward naval defense. For a moment he couldn’t find his glasses and, cursing, patted his pockets, making a mental note to have one of his aides drill a hole in the magnifying glass handle. As he was shortsighted in only one eye, it would save him forever searching. No way would he wear one of those chains. He grabbed his parka and told the duty officer he’d be outside.

  After the pipeline sabotage, two guards had been ordered by Norton to accompany the general wherever he went, just to be on the safe side — with the stipulation, however, that they must stay well back and make as little noise as possible. Pulling his forage cap down tightly beneath the parka hood, the general walked through snow flurries, head down against the wind and thwacking his thermal overlays with a swagger stick given him by CINCLANT — commander in chief Atlantic — at Norwood, U.K., before he’d left Europe.

  Trudging through the snow he was doing what Norton and other aides referred to as his “Moses in the Desert”—meditating upon the forthcoming campaign, recalling, as was his wont, the great commanders of history; not their virtues — everyone knew those — but their defects, their mistakes. At such moments he was lost in a kind of reverie of anticipation and awesome responsibility, and now in the flurries of snow that soon gave way to a steady wind, the thought that stole quietly upon him then possessed him and would fuel all his tactics was a conviction that wherever possible he must choose the battleground— not the Siberians. He must force them to come to him — though it was their country — to fight on the ground of his choosing.

  The trick, of course, was how to do it. It would involve doing precisely the opposite of what they would anticipate. The master plan excited him; but then, like the mournful cry of an Arctic wolf, the sound of the ice pressure ridges crushing carried the warning that the unfrozen sea to the south was both his way and his impediment to Siberia. Now that Ratmanov had been secured, marine expeditionary forces could be transported by air and air bases secured on the sparsely populated northern tundra of Siberia across the strait, bases from which U.S. air strikes could be made down the shield of Kamchatka Peninsula. But then what? He stopped suddenly in the snow, the two marine guards looking nonplussed at one another, snow now having been replaced by rain. Old “Von Freeman” was seemingly oblivious to the fact.

  He had seen the burning bush. The Pentagon would think him mad, as they had thought MacArthur mad when he had decided to hit Inchon—”The worst possible choice,” the experts had told him; as they had thought Hannibal mad for crossing the Alps, extending his supply line against all common sense. And so, too, Schwarzkopf’s commanders had been shocked by the idea of an outflanking left hook around the Republican Guard. And there had been the great failures, too, which, as the Chiefs of Staff had said, were doomed and which had ruined many a career.

  When Freeman showed it to Dick Norton, the only officer privy to his plan so far, Norton immediately saw the potential for a debacle. “In the middle of winter, General?”

  “Remember Frederick the Great, Dick. ‘L’audace! L’audace! Toujours l’audace!’ “ It was one of the general’s favorite sayings.

  “Perhaps, General,” said Norton, “but he won’t be with us.”

  “Yes, he will,” said Freeman, and there wasn’t a trace of frivolity in the general’s tone, nor in his eyes. His eyes were fixed on the map. “You know what a steeplechase rider does before the jumps, Dick?”

  “No idea, General.”

  “Walks the course,” Freeman said, indicating the map. “I’ve walked the course, Dick.” He flashed a smile. “Metaphorically speaking, of course. But I’ve been with them, all right.” His hand swept out over the western front. “The German campaigns, Napoleon’s. But I must confess no one’s been here: Far Eastern TVD. And right now, Dick, those Commies in Novosibirsk are thinking, how can they outfox me?” He turned to Norton once more. “You think they have any surprises, Dick?”

  “Be surprised if they didn’t, General.”

  “So would I. But what are they?”

  * * *

  Freeman and Norton, together with the rest of his HQ staff, pored over the myriad details for three possible amphibious landings south of the Bering Strait.

  Everything was considered: special forces that might be required for beach clearance, amphibious hovercraft going in over the icebreaker-cleared channels in the thicker coastal ice, assault ships, cargo-carrying choppers, airlift Hercules, attack helicopters, landing vehicles, air cover and close ground support from subsonic to Mach 2 aircraft. Then there were engineer and sapper battalions, supertough plastic piping “fascine”—tubes that could be dumped to fill a trench and across which a sixty-ton M-1 tank could pass, as well as flail and grader tanks to clear mines, and fiberglass-hulled mine clearers for the sea lanes. One armored division alone would need 620 thousand gallons of fuel, 319 thousand gallons of water, 82 thousand meals, and 6 thousand tons of ammunition a day. All had to be assigned, integrated into the overall attack plans. Freeman made it his personal responsibility to talk to the catering corps commanders, eliciting individual guarantees that each man in action would receive the required 3,000 calories a day, 4,200 for troops in Arctic battle.

  “Kick ass, do what you have to,” Freeman told them. “But remember Napoleon: An army marches on its stomach. If any of you forget it, I’ll have your hide plus a thousand-dollar fine.”

  “He’s got no authority to fine us — least not that much,” complained a cook.

  “You want to find out?” asked a quartermaster.

  The offended man was s
haking his head, pleased to see Freeman was moving on to breathe fire over some other poor bastard. “Those SAS guys were right. It’s ‘Von Freeman.’ “

  The general had already heard a rumor about the “Von” appellation and asked Norton if it was true.

  “Uh, yes, General. ‘Fraid so.”

  Freeman made no comment and, seemingly turning to a completely different subject, informed Norton that he’d seen some of the Canadian forces personnel assigned with his command wearing beards.

  “Hadn’t noticed, General.”

  “Well, I have. I want them off. Today.”

  “General, Canadian Navy sort of follows Royal Navy tradition. Allows—”

  “I don’t give a goddamn what the Royal Navy allows. I want those beards off. And if you don’t know why, Dick, you’re not doing your goddamn homework.”

  “No, sir.”

  Sometimes, Norton wrote in his diary that evening, Douglas Freeman could be as ornery as a cut pig. The general, he figured, knew that, like Dracheev, Novosibirsk, in the person of Marshal Yesov, C in C Siberian Forces, had its own surprises; as yet he had no idea what they were.

  * * *

  Though she was thoroughly familiar with the sights and smells of a military hospital, Lana was still unprepared.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Shirer gamely, his head completely swathed in bandages that held the compress against his left eye.

  “I ‘m…” began Lana, having to compose herself after having heard from the doctor upon her arrival in Anchorage that it was possible that the optic nerve had been partially severed. She smiled bravely, spoke softly. “I’m a nurse, remember?”

  “Right,” said Frank. There was no point kidding one another. If the optic nerve was severely damaged, then it would be the end of Frank’s career as a fighter pilot. The fact that it was the same eye that had been injured during his time as a presidential pilot didn’t make it any easier for him to accept. He knew that Lana could live with it, preferring that he never go back into combat, but, like most of his ilk, he lived for flying. Take away that, he told her, and—

  Lana said there was no point talking about it till they knew for certain, and she immediately felt guilty. If it had been any other patient she would have listened, knowing it was part of the therapy, but with the man she loved she found herself instead falling back on the bland cliches of reassurance and then just as quickly putting forth the most optimistic prognosis.

  “They can do wonders now. Lasers. You know at one time when a retina became detached — remember the Rumpole man?”

  Frank thought she meant the actor.

  “No, Mortimer, the lawyer who wrote it. His father had both retinas detached. Slipped a few feet one day on a ladder. Blind for the rest of his life. Well, nowadays they can spot weld the retinas back with a laser. Overnight stay in hospital, that’s all. Maybe even day surgery.”

  Frank said nothing, trying not to grimace with the pain; the Demerol was wearing off. But Lana had seen too many wounded not to have some idea of what it must have been like when the eye had been gouged, literally hanging by its optic nerve, and later when tiny fragments of foreign material had to be scraped from the eyeball. Sitting down beside his bed, she took his hand in hers and for a moment was transported back to her first casualty of the war — young William Spence — and shivered despite her resolve. She forced another smile. “Well, at least I’ll be seeing more of you — when I can get leave from Dutch, that is.” She tried to make it all breezy, “accentuate the positive,” but could see that either Frank hadn’t heard her or was momentarily overcome with the pain, or both. His hand tightened involuntarily as a spasm pierced the bloody socket of the eye, striking deep inside his skull somewhere.

  “What I can’t figure out,” he began, shifting position in the false belief of so many patients that movement itself would relieve the pain when it was really a shift in concentration that momentarily diverted thoughts of the pain, “is why did the bastard do it? There was no point to it. I mean—” Frank forced himself up further in the bed, Lana stacking the pillows behind him, staying close to him, gently massaging his neck. He turned to her, and she could see now how swollen the purplish and dark red tissue around the eyeball was.

  “No point,” Frank continued, “trying to get information from me. I mean they were overrun. Under attack. Damn it! What in hell did it matter what airfield or carrier I came from? Our guys were swarming all over them.”

  “Vengeance,” Lana said simply, her tone pregnant with the authority of experience. She was thinking of her husband, Jay. “Some people are like that.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Doesn’t have to, Frank. They get a kick out of it.”

  “If you’re under attack,” continued Frank, “you do what you have to, I guess. I mean, I know what it’s like in a furball— it’s you or the other guy. But, hell, why would someone come back at you like he did and… it’s.. it’s like shooting some guy in a chute.”

  Lana was moved by this streak of naïveté’ in Frank. A few years ago, before she’d been introduced to Jay and was overcome by the poise and wealth of Jay’s jet-setting image, she had met Frank briefly and gone out with him a couple of times, when he was one of the “one-eyed Jacks” of the president’s elite pilot list. Then she would have been — was — the naive one, not him. But with Jay she’d grown up quickly — too quickly, she thought sometimes. After La Roche, his sick sex, the beatings and the threatened tabloid smear of her parents should she even dare to leave him without his “permission,” she had realized, in a rush of growing up, just how brutal life could be. And now she found herself explaining sheer malice to Frank, a quality that was as alien to him as the thought of being grounded for the rest of his life. He was a warrior: a reflection of her dad in his forthrightness, his assumption that bravery under fire was de rigueur and nothing exceptional.

  He might be one of America’s top aces, a survivor of the MiG attacks led by the celebrated Soviet who had shot him down and whom Frank had in turn downed over Korea, but about men like Jay LaRoche he would never understand. His ideal of honor, like General Freeman’s, was in one sense ageless and as old, for all the high-tech machines he flew, as the dream of Camelot. Yet it was a vision that in the end sustained him as powerfully as the image of the shark held Jay in awe of sheer power unencumbered by anything “as antiquated,” in Jay’s words, “as principle.”

  It almost pained Lana more to see Frank perplexed by evil than to see him in the trauma of the pain; she couldn’t bear to hear him wonder about the kind of cruelty she hoped she had left behind with Jay. She wanted to get him off the subject. “You hear about Marchenko? “

  It worked, his attention immediately arrested by the mention of the Soviet top gun. Lana said it as if Marchenko were still alive, which was impossible; Frank’s RIO had seen the Fulcrum burst on impact over Manchuria. Unless…

  He felt his heart thumping. “He didn’t get out?”

  “That’s the story,” she said. “Course it could be Siberian propaganda. The rumor mill. You know how they love to—” For a split second Shirer was oblivious to his pain.

  “But Anderson didn’t see a silk. I mean—” He stopped, casting his mind back. Yes, they had definitely seen the Fulcrum hit. A silent orange blossom against the mountainous folds of snow. “I remember,” he said. “I asked Anderson, ‘Any sign of a chute?”Negative!’ “

  “Could he have missed it?” said Lana. “I mean, was it a clear day or—”

  Frank felt a stabbing beat between his eyes, like someone driving a stake into his forehead above the bridge of his nose. Damn it. Lana didn’t know a thing about planes — when he’d first talked to her about Mach she thought it was someone called “Mac.” It had become a joke between them: “Mac the Knife!” But in her layman’s ignorance of things aeronautical, she had, with the unwitting luck of people who, like his mother, chose a winner at Churchill Downs because the horse had a “nice name” inst
ead of studying the guide to form, managed to hit the bullseye with her question. There had been cloud, and it was quite possible Anderson had missed seeing a chute. The whole wing could have missed it, high above the stratus, everyone on a high after the shoot, eyes scanning above and behind lest any more bandits should come out of the sun into their cone to even the score.

  “You should ask him when you get back,” proffered Lana.

  “Back where?” It wasn’t said in self-pity, but until the bandage came off and they’d done the tests, no one would know where he was going. That was the first problem. The second one was that the SPETS had made it impossible for Anderson to answer anything. Frank felt exhausted, the hospital gown clinging to him from perspiration. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about how Anderson had died, wondering whether they’d found his body yet on a floe. Finding your dead wasn’t a high priority when you were on the eve of a major battle. Since the Siberians were fully expecting Freeman to attack — and were probably buoyed rather man depressed by how close the Americans had come to losing Ratmanov — it was sure to be one of the bloodier battles of the war. The scuttlebutt around the hospital was that Freeman’s convoys were underway even now.

  “Frank?” She asked him gently, deciding that they might as well hit it head-on after all. “Have you thought what you might like to do if the tests are negative — if there isn’t much they can do to restore your—”

  “No,” he said brusquely, “I haven’t.” His sudden, uncharacteristic mood change was spawned by thoughts of what he’d do if he ever caught up with the SPETS who had — maybe-blinded him in the left eye for life. He didn’t like what he thought of doing and, visibly distressed, tried to evict the thoughts of sheer vengeance as swiftly as an ice hockey forward checking another. But the more he tried, the more persistent they became.