by Ian Slater
“Some,” said Robert. “Enough to make sense of an intelligence report. Technical specs, that sort of thing.”
“We,” began Rogers, finding it difficult to get enough spittle to talk, “if you can get us to one — we can take her down.”
“Yeah, yeah!” said Aussie. “So you told me.” But now the phrase “take her” had shifted Aussie’s attention — he was thinking of a “bird” he said he’d had once in Wales. Yelling at them through the trembling of Stallion One as it dipped and rose over the contours of the taiga, more like a frigate in a rough sea, he was describing his good fortune to the submariners. “Jugs on her like this!” His palms cupped as he made an up-and-down motion. “I swear, biggest nungas you ever saw.”
Choir shook his head at the submariners.
* * *
Back at Second Army headquarters east of Yerofey Pavlovich, an eager young PR lieutenant came in and requested he be allowed to speak to Gen. Douglas Freeman on an important matter, refusing to tell Dick Norton what it was about. Freeman had come out, exhausted from giving his undivided attention to the minutiae of logistics that would be required to break out southwest toward Irkutsk and north to Yakutsk if the “Brentwood boys” succeeded.
“What’s on your mind, son?” asked Freeman. Norton, sensing the general’s mood, made a tactical retreat toward the coffee urn at the far end of the HQ hut.
“Sir, I’m Lieutenant Simpson, sir, and I’m responsible for your PR in the media pool in Khaba—”
“Don’t waste time,” Freeman ordered. “Spit it out.” This, with astonishing courage, the lieutenant proceeded to do. “Sir, the La Roche papers are murdering you. Not only back home but in Japan, the U.K. — all over the world, sir. And—” The lieutenant paused but then got right to it. “And the monocle doesn’t help — sir.”
“What?”
“The monocle, sir. Well, sir, it — it looks ridiculous, General.” He hurried on. “They’re calling you ‘Von Freeman’— the La Roche papers — and the Siberian propaganda radio is calling you a Nazi.”
Norton, seeing the general’s hand drop to his waist, thought that Freeman — fatigued from having been on his feet for over forty-eight hours without a break — might actually draw his revolver and put an end to the lieutenant.
Freeman stared at the lieutenant who, having said his piece, was leaning back at an impossible angle as Freeman advanced on him. “You cheeky sonofabitch! I oughta have you—NORTON!”
“General?”
“Is he correct?”
“Ah — well, that’s what they’re telling me, General.”
“Who?”
“The press.”
“Goddamn fairies!” Freeman exploded, rounding on Norton. “It’s your goddamned fault!” With that Freeman tore the monocle from its cord and threw it to the ground, crunching it under his boot. “You see that?” he bellowed at the lieutenant.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell those fairies that that’s what I’m going to do to the Siberian Thirty-first.” He turned about to get the attention of everyone in the hut. He already had it. “Or they will do it to us. We beat them or we the. Here — in Siberia. Every one of us. The U.S. Second Army does not retreat. Is that clear?” There was silence. “Norton, get the a WAM here immediately.” It was an Xm93 wide-area mine.
“Yes, General,” said Norton. When Freeman had disappeared through the green curtains that separated his war room from the rest of the hut, someone manning the radar said in low tones, “Is he going to blow us all up?”
“Shut up!” commanded Norton. “If I hear any more smartass—” The cruise alarm began its familiar howl. “Incoming!” came the warning over the PA. “Incoming!”
There was a shuffling noise outside the headquarters hut, for even though the cruise was still 150 miles — seventeen minutes— away, many of the men were already heading for the sandbagged shelters.
Mine clearance was still going on up ahead so that soon the Second Army would be on the move again, but so long as the missiles kept coming from Baikal, Freeman knew he couldn’t advance in any meaningful military sense of the word. And yet retreat would not only mean a triple humiliation for Second Army but the Siberians, smelling blood, their supplies building up along the Transbaikal for Yesov’s attack, would be content with nothing less than the destruction of the entire army.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The snow had stopped falling. Beyond them, under the steady roar of the choppers’ engines, lay the enormous folds of snow-covered Siberian cedar, larch, black spruce, and pine, broken here and there by clear, low-lying areas of oleniy mokh— “reindeer moss”—in reality flat areas of snow-covered lichens — and beyond this the five-thousand-foot barrier of the Khamar Daban Range. The effect of their sudden exit from the falling snow of the predawn light caused ambivalent feelings. For the two Cobras’ crews, clear weather meant good tank-killing conditions, but the S/D strike force and pilots aboard Stallions One and Two following the Cobras were not so joyful. The choppers might very well be like “needles in a haystack” against the vastness of the taiga, but even needles caught reflective sunlight that could be seen for miles beneath patches in the overcast but clear subarctic sky.
“Oh, isn’t this nice!” yelled out Aussie, jerking his head toward the panorama of forest and sky. “Just what the doctor ordered.” David Brentwood mustered as tough a look as he could, for even though he knew Lewis was one of the hardest men he’d ever served with, he doubted whether the newcomers aboard would be able to ignore the Australian’s inverted sense of humor. His brother and the other submariners, though David wouldn’t have had their job for the world, must, he thought, feel particularly vulnerable — quite literally fish out of water.
There was a “white out.” It was a phenomenon the pilots knew about but, contrary to widespread belief, the condition wasn’t something that occurred in a roaring blizzard. Rather, the sudden and, for those who had never experienced it, terrifying loss of perception could only be likened to that lightninglike anxiety suffered by panic attack victims. It occurred most often in clear albeit overcast conditions because of the contrast between the different whites of old and fresh snow.
The mistake of Stallion Two’s pilot was that in the moment of exhilarated relief during the exit from the falling snow to clear weather, he went off instrument flying to visual assist too quickly. In that split second he lost all depth perception, thinking he was far too high above the taiga when in fact he was far too close — only sixty feet above the blur of spear-shaped firs. His copilot realized it the moment the nose went down and pulled the stick, his feet jabbing the rudder control for uplift; but a rotor caught, and they were gone in a single somersault, rotors still spinning but upside down, cutting and slashing into the timber. The self-closing gas tank, built to absorb fifty-millimeter armor-piercing shells, imploded like a collapsed drum, spewing gas over red-hot bearings. The chopper disappeared below Cobra Two in a silent ball of saffron flame and snow, the latter rising like talc, coming down in a fine shower of rain that did nothing to extinguish the twenty-foot-high flame now licking the pines. There was a bang that everyone on the remaining Stallion and two Cobras heard.
“Holy mother of—” began Choir, but then, like the rest, he fell silent beneath the high whine of their Sea Stallion’s three General Electric turboshaft engines, its pilot instinctively going for height after the crash of the other Stallion before settling down again to the dangerous NOE flying. The submariners’ grim-lipped sonarman, Rogers, was sweating, praying again.
* * *
“Do as I tell you, damn it!” barked Cobra One’s pilot at his copilot/weapons officer. “We can’t go back. Endangers the whole mission. You know the fucking rules.”
The pilot was back on instrument flying and put on his sunglasses; not that this would be any protection against white out, but it might reduce the equally hazardous risk of ice blink, once they negotiated the passes of the range. In ice blink mirages of something tw
enty or more miles away across a vast sheet of ice could loom up with stunning clarity as if they were only a few hundred yards ahead.
* * *
“Relax, fellas!” It was Aussie. “Not as bad as you think. It helped us in a way.”
“What the shit d’you mean?” asked Rogers, uncharacteristic anger momentarily overcoming his air sickness and fear.
Aussie was lighting another cigarette. “Won’t be able to tell what it was — wreckage’ll look like a scrap yard. And same paint as their own, red star and all. And the guys — in Siberian uniforms.” Aussie looked at his watch. Freeman had even taken care to make sure they were of Russian make. “What are we, Davey?” Aussie asked Brentwood. “ ‘Bout a hundred miles from the lake? Twenty minutes from touchdown? Hell, it’d take ‘em fifteen minutes or so just to send out a search party — even if anyone did see the explosion. By then we’ll be down, or close enough. What we’ve gotta do now is head south for a while, out of sight of any pain-in-the-ass search party.”
“Yeah,” said one of the submariners, “but what if they’ve already spotted us? “
Aussie smiled. Choir and Davey had already seen it, Choir explaining it to the submariner. “Well, laddie, if anyone sees us, they’ll think we’re part of the rescue party. Same paint job— from any distance at all it’d be hard to tell. We’re too far inside enemy territory for them to think we might be—”
“You hope,” said the submariner.
“Ah, that’s not all,” said Aussie confidently. “You see, mate, when we start up those noisy Arrows anyone within cooee distance’ll think it’s one of their damned snowmobiles joining the search for the downed chopper.”
David Brentwood clicked on his throat mike. “Captain?”
“Go ahead.”
“This is Captain Brentwood. Suggest we divert south for a while — avoid any search party coming out of Port Baikal.”
“No problem.”
It took two minutes for the Stallion pilot to signal the two Cobras — intercraft radio silence being strictly enforced and requiring either hand or “craft maneuver” signalling before the three remaining choppers swung south on the last leg through or, if necessary, up over the six-thousand-foot Khamar Daban range before they could take a fix on Tankhoy, twenty-seven miles across the ice from Port Baikal.
* * *
Fifteen miles from where the Stallion had gone down, an argument was building between the ten members of a SPETS squad standing by a Hind helo.
“Idite za nimi”—”l say follow them in,” said the SPETS leader, referring to the three dots they could see heading for the Khamar Daban Range.
“Zachem?”— “Why?” asked the serzhant. “They’re probably ours. Big one’s probably a Hind, like ours. Other two are probably Havocs.”
“Hinds, Havocs!” shouted the SPETS leader.”You can’t tell from here even with binoculars. They were more than a mile off.”
“Whatever you say, Comrade,” replied the sergeant. “But I say we’re wasting time. Let’s go on to Ulan-Ude. Our orders are to relieve one of the sections at the head of the Thirty-first’s spearhead.”
“There are already two thousand of us at the Thirty-first’s spearhead,” said the leader.”I say let’s follow those three choppers.”
“Make up your mind, comrades,” advised the Hind captain assigned to transport the ten SPETS. “Personally I think we should go on to Ulan-Ude, as the sergeant says. We’re getting low on gas anyway.”
“Did you see them?” snapped the SPETS leader, a big man, well over six feet and broad but not an ounce of flab on him.
“No,” admitted the Hind pilot.
“You?” the leader asked the gunner.
“Too far off, sir,” said the gunner, and, quickly trying for compromise, added, “Why don’t we call Irkutsk, leave it up to them?”
The nine other SPETS waited for their captain to bawl out the air force pilot for forgetting they were on strict SPETS operational procedure — no radio contact allowed in the event it might be picked up by distant American AWACs. Tightening the sling of his AK-74, the SPETS leader then lifted his right fist, waving it in a circular motion. The Hind coughed, sputtered, and snow swirled about the SPETS as they clambered aboard. The Hind’s nose gunner, immediately in front of and beneath the pilot, was cursing, strapping himself in behind the twin 12.7-millimeter machine guns in his armor-plated cubbyhole. He had a girl, a Buryat, waiting for him in Ulan-Ude.
“Polnym khodom!”—”Dash speed!” ordered the SPETS captain. This should take it to 180 miles per hour — but a few miles would be lost because of the extra weight of the ten SPETS and the helo’s four “Swatter” antitank missiles.
The pilot went visual as he could not put on his radar; otherwise he would run the risk of setting off every AA gun and missile battery that was strung along Baikal’s lakeshore, camouflaged in the forests.
He barely managed to get a fix on the three distant helos; they looked like dots of pepper against the white pallet of the western sky. He was watching the gas needle — soon they’d have to be refueled, the nearest POL depot at Port Baikal. Damn the SPETS — they should have gone on to Ulan-Ude. He banked the gunship in the direction of the dots, doubting he’d catch them unless they suddenly jinxed due west and he could take the hypotenuse vector between them. If it was a Hind and two Havocs on patrol out of Port Baikal or Irkutsk further west, it would make him and the SPETS look real idioty. Well, it was the SPETS leader’s decision, not his. The pilot swung the Hind’s gun-sprouting nose up, climbing, going for “high ground” from which he could see better across the taiga. Even so, he lost sight of them for a moment, the three dots heading into one of the passes through the mountain range toward the frozen inland Sea of Baikal.
* * *
By now the lead Cobra was looking for muskeg, hoping for an open patch in the forest, no more than a mile or two from the shore, using Tankhoy as a general heading but keeping well away from any sign of habitation. It was the copilot who spotted a promising site, and within seconds the Cobra began a “sway,” signalling the Super Stallion and the other Cobra that he’d found a landing. The air was so clear now he could see a thin wisp of smoke from what had to be Port Baikal across the lake, the smoke rising to the right of creamy white cliffs of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s spur line from Kultuk at the southern end of the lake to Port Baikal. He told his copilot he didn’t know which was best for the commandos: clear weather, which would make it much easier and therefore quicker for them to reach their target, or snowy conditions, which, while slowing them down, would have provided them with more cover.
“They got clear weather, man,” said the copilot/weapons officer. “You can see for miles. They ain’t got no choice.”
“True.”
* * *
The Snowcat “Arrow,” technical designation UH-19P, was based on another American air-cushion vehicle speed record-holder, the UH-15. Like the UH-15 hovercraft, the Snowcat was triangular or, as seen from above, arrowhead-shaped, a mid-placed cockpit seating three, the military version placing the driver slightly higher and behind the other two.
Nineteen feet long and seven and a half feet wide, the triangular Snowcat, with an eight-inch clearance, was powered by an 1100cc Toyota car engine, its speed the same as the old record-setting UH-15: eighty miles per hour over water, ninety miles per hour over ice or snow, with a maximum gradient tolerance of thirty to forty degrees, depending on the condition of snow or ice pack. Its payload was a thousand pounds, which could easily handle three commandos and their equipment. In the lead Arrow this included a heavy, swivel-mounted, forty-millimeter M-19 machine gun in front of the cockpit as well as the gun’s box-contained belt feed ammunition — the gun’s forty-inch barrel having a theoretical 180-degree traverse. In practice, as Aussie had discovered on a dry-run assembly, the safest maximum arc of fire was 90 degrees, consisting of a 45-degree swing left or right. The noise that bothered him was, ironically, not the main thrust engine but the ai
r cushion’s lift system, powered by an 1800-horsepower, 1600cc Briggs and Stratton vertical-shaft lawnmower engine, which drove an axial fan, the latter’s six-foot-diameter blade mounted at the back, or widest part of the arrowhead.
Delivery of the three-man crafts, ordered much earlier in the campaign by Freeman, had been delayed not because of any mechanical malfunction but because of the general’s insistence that the usual black skirting for the air cushion be painted white. The delay in delivery meant that the eight “designated drivers,” as David Brentwood had called them, had had only an hour or so to practice the previous evening. Now, with one Stallion, gone, he had only four drivers. But the controls were simple, even if Aussie complained of their “bloody Sunday” lawnmower noise and the rough ride, which frankly had surprised all of them except Robert Brentwood who, as part of his naval training in combined ops amphibious training, was already familiar with the gut-shuddering motion of ACVs, in particular the monstrous, barge-sized marine hovercrafts.
As the four craft from the remaining Stallion slid effortlessly down the rollers of the Stallion’s ramp door, guided by the six-man S/D and four-man sub crew team, the crews of the three choppers, zipping up their thick thermal jackets, were already busy spreading out the camouflage nets over the lone Stallion and two Cobras.
“Did you know the men on the Stallion well?” Robert Brentwood asked his younger brother, in an effort to share his loss of the four submariners.
“No.” It was said almost rudely, but David, as commander of the land part of the mission, was too preoccupied with its details for any sentiment to intrude. Besides, there was a nagging, albeit childish, determination on his part not to show any weakness to his older brother. As if reading his mind, Robert immediately deferred to his younger brother’s authority on the timing of the mission now that there had been the complication of the Havoc attack. “Wait till nightfall? “
