Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “Don’t fight it,” said Lana with a prescience that surprised him. “My dad always told the you can’t help what you think. It’s what you do that counts.”

  Frank shrugged. Was she talking about what he’d like to do to the SPETS or Marchenko—if the Soviet was still alive? Well, he told himself, he wouldn’t be doing much of anything if the doc said the eye was finished. It would be home and repatriation. He knew he couldn’t explain it to anyone who wasn’t a flyer but quite calmly, without a trace of self-pity, Frank Shirer told himself that if he couldn’t fly again, life simply wouldn’t be worm it. Might as well tell a man he’d be impotent for life.

  “Sorry, hon,” Lana said, “but I have to go. Get my ride back to Dutch.”

  “Damn Dutch.”

  “I know, but with Freeman’s—”

  “Yeah,” responded Frank, “you’re going to be needed unfortunately.”

  When she kissed him she was surprised by the lack of warmth. So preoccupied was he with what the future held for him, his mind wasn’t even on sex.”I’ve asked one of the boys flying the Medevac Hercules,” she told him, “to call the hospital here. Even then I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll get word to you soon as I can.”

  She didn’t trust herself to answer without getting all teary. For heaven’s sake, Lana, she told herself on the army shuttle bus back to Elmendorf, he’s not dead. But she’d never seen him so dispirited either; more like a small boy sent to the dugout than someone dealing realistically with his situation. Of course, it was never the same when you weren’t the one it was happening to. Everyone knew how to deal with it when they weren’t involved. But it was because she had loved the boy in Frank that made it so terrible. When she left him he’d looked old. Maybe after his pain subsided…

  She closed her eyes, gripping her shoulder bag hard as the bus wound up around the ABM sites that ringed Elmendorf, praying for the return of the time during which she had believed absolutely in a benevolent and all-loving God; asking, begging, that Frank’s sight not be damaged beyond repair, that he might fly again.

  * * *

  As rounds began for the doctors at Anchorage Hospital, the sun was shining off the Chugash Mountains, turning them a creamy pink in a breathtaking backdrop to the harbor. Over four thousand miles to the west, outside the KMK — Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat — factory, in Novokuznetsk southeast of Novosibirsk, it was midnight. But there was to be no delay.

  The director dismissed the argument of the works’ political officer that it would be better to exact punishment in daylight, where more people would see it, the director’s point being that the offense of the worker, one Dimitri Menisky, talking about the factory work through a haze of vodka among friends, was such a serious breach of security under the circumstances that Novosibirsk would simply brook no procrastination. In any case, argued the director forcefully, the execution within an hour of the man’s arrest would have a salutary effect.

  Accordingly Menisky, forty-three, father of two, a boy, Ivan, and a girl, Tatya, was taken outside engine shop three, well away from the pile of scrap metal lest there be any ricochet, and, despite his falling on his knees and begging for mercy, was machine-gunned to death while snow poured through the penumbra of the yellow yard light. His crumpled body was left for one hour, this being a concession to the political officer, to make the point among the other workers. It was superfluous, for within ten minutes of the execution every man and woman in the KMK already knew about the fate of Dimitri Menisky from shop three, and no one was going to say anything to anyone outside the factory about what was going on inside.

  * * *

  The surgeon attending Frank Shirer was twenty-nine, and with his white coat wore an air of authority that his baby face undermined. Not surprisingly he tried to compensate by wearing a no-nonsense, Gradgrind-like countenance, particularly in front of an air ace, projecting a stern preoccupation with facts. For this reason some of the older veterans among the patients called him “Detective Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”

  “Well, Major. Fact is, the tests confirm that vision in the left eye is virtually nil. Even with our technology there’s nothing much…”

  Shirer didn’t hear the rest — didn’t want to. His normally rugged, handsome features took on a slate-gray pallor. While the doctor’s voice seemed far off, he was nevertheless acutely aware, as in the rush of a dogfight, of every smell and color about him— a sharp smell of iodine coming from the next bed, the stench of sick from several beds to his right. Yet he looked disbelieving, his mind temporarily rejecting what he had clearly heard; this despite the “fact” that he’d been preparing for it all night. It was as if they had him up past seven G’s in the centrifuge, his body clammy with the shock, feeling like a sponge being crushed by an immense, immovable weight.

  “So.” Detective Joe’s voice was floating about the periphery of the spinning, uncontrollable world. “You’ll have to be content with flying a desk from now on. Fact is…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to call Lana, the stench of defeat redolent in the hospital’s pervasive and cloying antiseptic as oppressive to him as when he’d first entered. He felt his hatred of the Siberians rising and did nothing to thwart the flood of bile, sensing that if he tried to fight it now, hold it back, it would permanently poison him and make him something he did not want to be. Voodoo priests stuck pins into dolls; all he could do, knowing the improbability of ever meeting the SPETS who had gouged his eye, was envisage shooting down Marchenko, the MiG ace becoming the embodiment of all his disappointment and anger. It was unreasonable, he knew, but you had to focus on something.

  When the Wave, her soft, full-bosomed perfume reminding him of Lana, removed the bandage to change the dressing, he could see only a watery, milky image of her. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man was king, but not in the United States Air Force. The “fact,” as Dr. Joe Friday had underscored with his diagnosis, was that the USAF did not, would not, entrust a one-eyed man with seventy million dollars’ worth of merchandise.

  A limey, one of a handful of SAS survivors from the “Rat Raid,” was walking up the aisle between the beds, his face a gauze mask. “Whatcha mate? Have a fag?” He offered Shirer a Benson and Hedges. “Course you can’t puff it in ‘ere. Old Muwer Legree’ll be onto you.” The gauze mask nodded toward the head nurse at her station. “Tough old bird,” commented the cockney. “Rawer fight the muwer-in-law — an’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”

  “No, thanks,” said Frank to the proffered cigarettes. “Don’t smoke.” He wanted the man to go away; could never understand limeys properly anyhow.

  “Neiver did I — till the punchup started. Miss a drag some-thin’ fierce when I’m in the sheep dip.”

  Shirer didn’t know what the hell the sheep dip was and he knew the limey knew he didn’t know so why the hell didn’t he just bug off?

  “Slit trench,” explained the gauze mask.”Filled wif all kinds o’ muck: sheep shit, dead rats. You name it, sport, it’s there. Hard to lie in it wivout movin’ for up to twelve hours. No fuckin’ tea party, I can tell you mat.”

  “Guess not,” said Shirer disinterestedly.

  “Still, I’d rawer a sheep dip than this lot!” He jerked a nicotine-stained thumb toward his mask. “Fuckin’ Phantom of the Opera! Least you got your fuckin’ face, ‘aven’t you?”

  Frank knew that JFK had been right: Life was unfair, and in a world where thousands starved while you had the glorious privilege of flying, you had no cause to moan. But the limey didn’t help — at least not then — with his wisecracking camouflaging his own terror beneath the British mask of self-deprecation. Yet this wounded English soldier was to have a profound effect on what would happen to Shirer.

  “You a sky jockey?” asked the cockney.

  “Was, “said Frank.

  “Ah, never say the, mate. Never say the.”

  The Brit reminded Fr
ank of Eliza Doolittle’s father: “Get the to the church on time!” He thought about Lana, about whether they’d ever be able to get married, whether the slimeball Jay La Roche would ever release her. Thinking of Lana, he felt himself having what the nurses called a “tent,” the erection pressing against the sheet. He wanted to tell the limey to buzz off; yet he knew what the limey had said was right. You should never say the. But the prospects right then were as bleak as the Aleutians in the winter chill and, like all who are very ill, no matter for how short or long a time, he found it impossible at that moment to imagine he could ever be well again, and that fear was his real terror.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Northern Pacific

  “Quantity has a quality of its own,” said Freeman in his address to the task force commanders gathered aboard the Marines’ LHD amphibious assault ship the USS Winston Davis. “It’s a Leninist dictum the Russians have embraced ever since the Bolshevik Revolution. Their reasoning is simple: throw enough at the enemy, overwhelm him with numbers of tanks, ships, planes, and men, and some are bound to get through, enough to breach our defenses. Your job, gentlemen, now, and my job when we go ashore, is to stop them. Stop them so effectively that even if a few can get through it won’t be enough to impede us. The attendant danger for us, however, is not the Siberians; it is that in stopping them we will adopt an overly defensive mode. That would be a crucial mistake. Our job is to attack, to take Irkutsk just west of Lake Baikal. Irkutsk is the key, gentlemen! If we take Irkutsk our air force will be able to radiate out into the industrial heart of Siberia. Without Irkutsk our bombers’ fighter escorts would have to have in-air refueling — distances are too great. So our job is to attack the Siberian shield to get far enough in so that our fighters don’t have to refuel in air and become sitting ducks.”

  He paused, eyes taking in the collective brass in the ship’s rigged-for-red situation room. “There’s another old adage, gentlemen, as true now as it was for Sherman: Offense is the best defense.” His fist clenched. “Go forward to meet them. Engage at every possible point. The entire Soviet military philosophy rests upon the necessity of the quick victory before their administrative deficiencies — their overcentralization — constipates their lines of supply. In this their navy and air force are no different from their army. They’ll throw everything — everything they’ve got at us, but if you can hold and advance you’ll turn the tide. Attack, gentlemen! Attack! That’s the strategy here.”

  Freeman’s message to the noncommissioned officers and men throughout the Seventh Fleet’s task force was much more succinct. “Nothing in history compares with this battle. Siberia, the only country now capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world, is testing our will. Novosibirsk had a chance for peace and chose war instead. Well, we’re going to give it to him — in spades. Now, you navy boys, it’s your job to get us there. And I know you will, and when you do, I promise you we’ll kick ass from Kamchatka to Kiev. God bless you all.”

  There was a complaint from one of the female quartermasters in the task force about the exclusion of women in his address. Freeman was taken aback when Norton so advised him.

  “What the hell does she mean?” he asked Norton, the latter’s grimace the first sign of seasickness as the two men made their way up from the mess deck to the open air of the 41,000-ton amphibious assault ship Winston Davis. It was one of scores of ships in the task force carrying supplies for Second Army, including the amphibious assault vehicles, attack and transport choppers, and AV-8 Harrier ground support fighters needed for the eighteen hundred marines aboard each ship.

  “She noted, General,” explained Norton, “that you didn’t mention women once in your address, whereas you used the expression ‘navy boys’ several times.”

  “Oh, for Chrissake, Dick! Navy gals were the ones who flew the lead choppers into Pyongyang.”

  “Yes, General, I know, but in the interest of morale… We’ve got over five hundred women in the twenty-thousand-man — I mean ‘person’—assault force.”

  “Yes, yes, all right. What’s her name?”

  “Quartermaster Sarah Lee.”

  “Goddamn cheesecake, isn’t it?”

  Norton could taste the bacon he’d had for breakfast. It was threatening to come straight up, and the quicker he got out to the fresh air of the flight deck, away from the combined stink of diesel oil and recycled air, the better.

  “All right, relax, Dick. Won’t say anything to offend the—” He paused, “—lady. I suppose if I call them ‘lathes’ I’ll be on a discrimination charge.”

  “Will I put a call through, General?”

  “Later — when we go below. But Dick?”

  “Sir?”

  They were passing through the “light lock,” in whose chamber all illumination went out as soon as they began to spin the wheel to open the outer door leading to the deck. Although Norton could not see the general, the latter’s tone had changed to one of dead seriousness. “Aren’t any females in the tank divisions, are there? I told the Pentagon about that. I don’t want any tank crewmen killed trying to figure out how some dame is going to piss in her helmet while everybody looks the other way. Last I heard Siberia’s armored don’t give the enemy time off for rest stops and I—”

  “No women in the armored units, General, far as I know. Support, perhaps, but not in the tanks themselves.”

  Norton had lied. It had been an ongoing fight between Freeman and the Pentagon since the beginning of the war. There were several women, Norton knew, qualified as gunners, but he wasn’t having the commander of Operation Arctic Front suffer a coronary before any of the first three landings they were going to make on the Kuril Islands, the opening stage of the air-land battle. Freeman was silent for a few minutes as they stood on the flight deck, cold Arctic air whistling about them, the salty tang at once invigorating and freezing, stars showing through intermittent clouds but the sky on their westward heading thickening. The sea was moderate so far, but the latest meteorological report showed the state of sea deteriorating the further westward the task force steamed.

  “First few hours’ll be critical, Dick. As it always is, of course, in an operation of this kind, but particularly here. We need the Kurils for air bases as well as those in Japan if we’re going to make the landing on eastern Siberia proper.”

  Two of the three landings, unknown to anyone but battalion-level commanders, were feints, “Persian Gulfs,” so-called because of the Marine feint made off the beaches of Kuwait during the Iraqi war while the Twenty-fourth made their end run around the Republican Guards. Only in this case the marine feints would be to sucker Siberian navy and air-arm elements away from the main landing. Meanwhile Freeman, as supreme commander, had designated the Petropavlovsk sub base on Kamchatka a top-priority air target, the attacks on the sub pens to be launched from Attu Island at the western end of America’s Aleutian chain, which curved like a scythe toward Kamchatka, Siberia’s sparsely populated protective arm.

  * * *

  Steaming out from Vladivostok, with Admiral Baku in command, was the center of the Soviet interdiction force, the sleek, 910-foot-long, 110-foot-wide, 43,000-ton “Kiev” class carrier Murmansk, her deck sprouting vertical/short takeoff Forger A and B fighter bombers together with Ka-25 Hormone and Ka-27 Helix antisubmarine helicopters. The carrier’s four shafts spun effortlessly through the northwestern Pacific under the impetus of the ship’s 210,000 horsepower. At thirty knots the carrier’s speed eastward to meet the American force was aided by prevailing westerlies and the eastward-flowing Kuroshio Current. Murmansk was seven knots slower than her opposite number, the 1,040-foot-long, Nimitz class carrier USS Acheson, under the command of Adm. Charles Burke. Her flight deck 252 feet, her displacement 91,487 tons, she was twice as big as the Murmansk, her two nuclear reactors giving her the 280,000-shaft horsepower with which to move her ninety-four aircraft westward. The aircraft were a “medley,” as Burke referred to them, of F-14 Tomcats, F-15 Strike Eagles, F-4G Wild
Weasels, Grumman Intruders, and a pride of two Stealth fighter bombers.

  At first glance the core of Baku’s twenty-four-ship Siberian force around the Murmansk—her screen including two guided-missile cruisers, fifteen missile destroyers, and six fast frigates — seemed to be outclassed by the thirty-one-ship American battle group concentrated about the USS Acheson, with its screen of five 9,600-ton Ticonderoga class guided-missile cruisers, five 11,000-ton Virginia class cruisers, and twenty Truxtun and Bainbridge class destroyers. And the Siberians were outclassed — on the surface. This despite the fact that the Murmansk carried something deadly in addition to aircraft — namely four twin surface-to-air launchers, twelve vertical surface-to-air N-9 launchers, and eight surface-to-surface, that is, ship-to-ship N-12—Sandbox, 340-mile-range — missiles with eight reloads.

  In addition to the Baku task force, however, the Siberian commander had ordered two nuclear-powered, 24,000-ton Kirov class battle cruisers out of Pacific Fleet headquarters at Petropavlovsk. Speeding eastward at thirty-two knots, the rang korablyna— “first-class rated”—Kirov cruisers carried fifty-two missile launchers each and ten antisubmarine torpedo launch tubes. They sliced through the swells on their way to intercept the Wisconsin and Missouri, which were en route to shell the Kommandorsky Islands air base off Kamchatka, from which Freeman did not want to be harassed on his northern flank. The mission of the two Siberian cruisers was to dispose of the old American battle wagons, thus saving the Kommandorskys — after which the two Siberian cruisers would proceed further south to harass the American task force’s northern flank. And the American advantage in number of ships over the Siberians was about to be drastically redressed by Baku’s use of a piece of equipment that the Soviet admirals, true to the Leninist dictum of quantity producing its own quality, believed would overwhelm more sophisticated weaponry.

  Baku, with the formidable backing of his admirals in the Red Banner Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok, had got what he wanted: flotillas of over three hundred relatively cheap, high-powered, highly efficient “littoral” craft small missile patrol and torpedo boats for regional defense. These consisted of the Sarancha class (148-foot, 60-knot attack hydrofoils carrying 60-mile-range SS-N-9 and SS-N-4 missiles with a multibarrel, thirty-millimeter gun for close-in work), the hydrofoil Matka class boats (armed with two Styx antiship missiles, a 76.2-millimeter forward gun, and a multibarrel thirty-millimeter), and Nanuchka class Ills. The latter was in effect a thirty-thousand-horsepower-driven guided missile Corvette, which, though only 194 feet, 6 inches long, and with a draft of less than eight feet, carried SS-N-9 Siren antiship missiles in two triple launchers and also a surface-to-air N-4 antiaircraft missile. It was the same class of ship that, sprouting a 76.2-millimeter antiaircraft gun and thirty-millimeter close-in multibarrel, had been the spark that lit the fuse of war when it had attacked Ray Brentwood’s USS Blaine off Korea.