Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

“No,” answered David, adjusting his ammo pouch pack. “We go now.”

  “You worried about that Havoc?”

  “Yes. Maybe they’ll send out a search party. Better we push off soon as the birds are covered.”

  Aussie looked around at the mention of “birds,” obviously thinking of making a crack, but he didn’t. There was too much to do helping Choir who, with David and Aussie, would man the lead Arrow; the sub crew of four and the other three Delta men would spread out in the other three Arrows. Some weapons, including a Stinger, a LAW antitank tube, and Aussie’s long sniper rifle, had to be strapped to the fuselage before they left. Choir was checking the front of the Arrow, making sure the protective plastic barrel cap was tight enough to withstand the rapid vibration of the air cushion.

  Robert Brentwood called the other three submariners over. He would be driving one of the Arrows, Rogers another. “Remember, we’ll go in single file — S/D One leading, S/D Two covering our rear. Literally.” A couple of men smiled.”They’re the ones with experience in this kind of operation. Rogers—”

  “Sir?”

  “You’ll be right behind their lead Arrow. I’ll be behind you. Remember, single line formation for as long as we can — hopefully the whole way. But if anything goes wrong and we’re fired on from the flanks, then we move to abreast position.”

  “Whose breast?” interjected Aussie nearby. The submariners ignored him. Robert reassured them. “Your part’ll start on the sub.” They all knew he meant if they reached Port Baikal and could take a GST without being killed first. But Brentwood knew it wasn’t time to kindle the doubt in everyone’s mind.

  “What are they going to do after?” asked Rogers. He meant what would happen to the S/D team.

  “They’ll come back to the choppers, wait till darkness or a snowstorm, whichever comes first, and take off with the Cobras and the Stallion. Look, don’t worry. Once we get a sub we’ll be the safest of all.” Only Rogers understood immediately, the point being that, once they were below, the sub would be the same as any other of the three or four GSTs they figured were operating in the lake.

  “It’ll be a lookalike masked ball,” Robert Brentwood joked. “All look the same; nobody’ll be able to see us anyway. All done by sound, remember, fellas.”

  “Quiet!” It was Aussie Lewis, and through the ear-ringing silence of the forest they could hear the distant chopping sound of helicopters. “Sure as hell’s not ours,” pronounced one of the Cobra pilots.

  “Get those Arrows out of the open!” ordered Aussie.

  With everyone but Aussie Lewis lending a hand, the four Arrows were pushed back up the rollers into the Stallion beneath the camouflage net.

  Aussie broke off into the cover of the forest, whipping off the canvas cover from the Haskins rifle, and, without flipping open the bipod, rested the ice-cold, twenty-three-pound weapon against a fir, turning the scope’s “bullet” impact screw. Withdrawing the bolt — this being necessary before loading each 1.5-ounce bullet, whose combination incendiary/HE/high temperature, super-hardened penetrator head was capable of smashing through a plane engine or passing through an APC — he waited. Either way, Lewis figured if the Siberians spotted something and hovered over them even for a second, he’d cost them a pilot, gunner, or the “whole mother,” as the three Delta men called an enemy chopper. The noise was louder now; the rotor slap, while not overhead, was coming much closer. He glimpsed Rogers, the submariner, only about ten feet from him, under one of the Cobra’s nets, eyes closed. Another prayer. Aussie preferred to trust in his Kevlar bullet-proof vest. He saw movement — Choir Williams kneeling beneath the camouflage net of the Stallion, ready with his squad automatic weapon, and Salvini, one of the Delta men, his M-60 resting on his knee, right hand on the grip.

  * * *

  In Port Baikal, the overtime midnight-to-eight shift over, Nefski’s subaltern came home to his small, drab apartment block, one of the largest buildings in the town. Taking off his greatcoat, he kissed his wife, her Buryat face lined with the travail of being a garrison wife. He told her that she looked tired.

  “Kak vsegda”—”Like always,” she replied, surprised by the kiss.

  Hanging up his coat in their apartment’s tiny hallway, he glanced at the laundry bag that hung from the knob on their bedroom door and announced generously that he’d take it down the hallway to the communal laundry for her.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. She always had.

  “Rest,” he said.

  “Rest?” She hadn’t heard him tell her to rest in twenty-two years. Not even when their second child, now a KGB border guard like his father, had been born did he tell her to rest. Whenever he was off guard duty she was expected to be his servant — the only thing he’d do would be to take his boots off, then it was “You have the samovar going?” And always, like this evening, it was going. Except tonight there was no question about the samovar — His Royal Highness had become Comrade Highness. Peeling one of the onions she’d had in the line of glass jars she kept in the window to catch what winter sun she could, Tanya’s eyes began to water and, taking the kitchen rag from its rack by the old age-veined porcelain sink, she wiped her eyes. Seeing the rag was ready for washing, she took it out into the hallway. “Ivan!” she called. The moment he looked back at her from the front door, he was a picture of guilt, a thief running away with the laundry bag. Another peculiar thing — he’d changed into his best weekend trousers.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Can’t a man offer to help his wife now and then?” he shot back defensively. “All the time we hear about Siberian women complaining they are slaves, you never get help. Well? I’m giving you help, woman.”

  “In your Sunday clothes?”

  “Ah! I spilled coffee on them,” he said, meaning his uniform.

  It was a dim, sickly, thirty-watt bulb in the hallway, but even so she could see he was blushing. Immediately she suspected another woman and grabbed the bag from him.

  “Ah—” he uttered disgustedly, snatching his greatcoat from the hallway and jerking open the door.

  “Where are you going? Ivan, where—”

  “Out!” It meant he was going to the Port Baikal Hotel to get blind drunk.

  Tanya was convinced it was another woman now. And when, her heart beating in panic, she inspected the trousers, she found the evidence. He’d tried to sponge it off, but the edge of the stain was stiff, as if it had been starched. She sat in the hallway for half an hour without moving, but all that time a volcanic rage was welling within. Finally she made her way to the kitchen, the soup nearly burnt dry, where she took one of the onions from the jars, laid it on the countertop, and sat waiting for him.

  The moment he came in she screamed and threw the jar, aiming for his head. He recoiled, getting an arm up in time, the jar hitting him below the left eye. Closing, raining blows against him, she told him she’d never let him touch her again, shouting that he was to get out and never come back. She didn’t care if he died in the snow.

  “Touch you!” he shouted back drunkenly. “Who’d want to touch you, you fat slob?” She threw another onion bottle at him, the onion’s long shoot trailing like a taper, but all her strength had gone in her rage, and the jar missed, hitting her anorak instead, falling harmlessly to the floor, rolling along the worn linoleum. He stuck his head back inside to say that it was his apartment, too. She tried to throw the laundry bag at him but fell.

  * * *

  The KGB duty officer told him there was no way he could come in on his shift tomorrow afternoon looking like that. He could lie and tell Nefski he’d fallen or something, but Nefski would never believe such a story and suspect he’d been drunk and fighting again, for which Nefski would give him a punishment.

  “You’d better stay here,” the duty officer told him. “Take guard duty at the dock. Easy work, but don’t go taking a snooze.”

  Ivan didn’t like the idea of guard duty at thirty below, in Port B
aikal or anywhere else, but in truth he rather relished having told his comrades just what had happened. A man whose wife suspected him of seeing another woman — well, his reputation rose among the boys.

  “Colonel Nefski’s back on duty later today,” warned the duty officer. “In case he visits the dock you’d better have a good explanation ready. Tell him you were hit by an icicle or something.” It was a good story, Ivan having seen a number of soldiers who had been injured, some of them seriously, when a huge icicle, having built up after successive snowstorms, thawed a little and fell from a roof’s eave like a club.

  * * *

  The pilot of the SPETS chopper that had been following the three fly-size specks had now lost sight of his quarry. They had disappeared somewhere in the taiga, but the taiga was a sea of snow-covered forest, clearings like those he’d already flown over as numerous as troughs in a sea, and all looking more or less the same. He could spend weeks in a futile search. “Turnback?” he asked the SPETS captain.

  “No, go around to the end of the lake. See if they came down there. Maintain radio silence in case they are enemy choppers.”

  “Tak tochno”—”Yes, sir,” answered the pilot, taking the Hind out over the edge of the forest. The Hind was now above the southern end of the mirror-finish expanse of ice that was twenty-five miles wide and almost four hundred miles long.

  * * *

  David Brentwood saw the blob of the SPETS chopper looking for them, passing within a quarter mile, and glanced at his watch. The Stallion pilot told him the Hind would probably be doing around 150 knots.

  “So,” estimated David, “they should be across the lake in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do we still go across in daylight?” asked Robert Brentwood.

  “Affirmative,” said David. “If they do report any possible enemy activity to Irkutsk or Port Baikal, men we might as well hit ‘em sooner rather than later. Give them less time to prepare.”

  “There’s another consideration,” put in Robert. “You don’t load on your torpedoes and missiles at night if you can help it.”

  “Good thinking, Bob!” said Aussie approvingly, Robert Brentwood more surprised than offended by the Australian’s easy familiarity with rank.

  “Okay,” said David, “then we go now. Synchronize oh eight one zero hours… now! We leave at eight-thirty.” He glanced across at Aussie. “Hope you and Choir made sure that these jobs—” He indicated the four Arrows, “—are properly winterized?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Aussie with exaggerated bonhomie. “Oil in those suckers’d lubricate a desert whore.”

  One of the submariners asked Aussie, “You ever think of anything but sex?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  “Beer! Lordy, what I’d give for a schooner of Foster’s right now.”

  “Freeze your guts out,” said Choir.”I can’t feel my toes.”

  “Then wriggle them, sweetheart,” said one of the Delta men. “You never have winter training?”

  “What for?” asked Aussie facetiously, despite the fact that the SAS winter training had been a top priority. “That’s only for ski bums.”

  “Keep quiet!” said David.

  From then on all they could hear was the soft moaning of the taiga, as lonely a sound as any of them had ever heard. For the next twenty minutes it was time for every soldier in the ten-man team and the Stallion’s and Cobras’ crews, who would stay behind, to be with himself, to go over what he had to do — to meditate upon the need for speed and surprise. David smelled the clean fragrance of winter pine that not even deep snow could suffocate, and momentarily he thought of Georgina, of what she was doing at this very moment. In England it would be 11:15 in the evening. A clump of snow fell from a branch, jolting him back to the taiga. He went over the satellite pics again, noting that what looked like it could be a slipway was left of the town near one of the railway tunnels they’d had to build on the cliffs coming around the lake’s southwestern end.

  At 8:30 they started the four Arrows, the rattling roar of the engines alarming.

  “Christ!” said Choir, usually the quietest of the three SAS men. “They’ll hear us clear to the Pole.”

  “Ah, rats,” said Aussie, climbing into the front seat, strapping himself in next to Choir.”Don’t sweat it, mate.” He patted the SPETS shoulder patch on the otherwise all-white winter garb. “They’ll just think it’s a few comrades coming across.”

  Choir said something about Aussie being the one who’d been going on so much about the noise, but it was lost to the roar of the four engines. Aussie and Choir found it a squeeze. Although normally there was plenty of room for two, they were both in bulky winter uniforms. And while the case containing Aussie’s sniper rifle was lashed to the fuselage, Aussie, on David Brentwood’s order, had to hold the Stinger’s AA tube like a cylindrical map case between his legs, eliciting an obscene comment from the Delta man with the M-60 light machine gun in the fourth and last Arrow. Choir checked the first few exposed rounds of the forty-millimeter box/belt ammo feed for the M-19 heavy machine gun mounted on the front of the lead Arrow. Each six-ounce round, both ends looking like round lollipops, was in effect a six-ounce grenade, capable of piercing sixty millimeters of armor plate at three miles, the rate of fire in “cooler barrel” Arctic conditions being 350 rather than 320 rounds a minute. Though it could be either electrically or mechanically operated, Choir didn’t like the “beast”; the M-19, for all its firepower, had a bad habit of jamming every twenty-nine hundred rounds or so.

  “Not to worry, sport!” yelled Aussie. “If you can’t kill what you gotta kill in nine minutes, Choir, you ain’t never gonna do it.”

  As they moved off, throttles closed down to just above stall, the heavy snow and trees absorbing the noise much more than they had anticipated, they made their way cautiously through the trees and light underbrush to the lake’s edge. Choir was still tugging the forty-millimeter belt worriedly. “Don’t worry, mate,” Aussie told him. “Hopefully you won’t have to use it.”

  “Right.”

  “You mean ‘bullshit’!” laughed Aussie.

  “Right.”

  The lake hurt their eyes. Though overcast the glare was intense, and within seconds every one of the ten men in the S/D/ sub team had pulled down his sunglasses which, again on Freeman’s insistence, were all Soviet issue, captured on the way to Khabarovsk.

  * * *

  The SPETS chopper saw them.

  Following David Brentwood’s lead in the first Arrow, the drivers in the other three Arrows behind opened up the throttles so wide their wrists ached, the midpoint between the railway tunnel up left a hundred yards or so above the lakeshore and the town’s small library and hotel a few hundred yards to the right.

  Sonarman Rogers, driving the second Arrow with Delta trooper O’Reilly, swung left to avoid the exhaust from the first vehicle, his Arrow shuddering over small, swollen ice ridges on the otherwise mirror-glass-smooth lake. Rogers glanced ahead for a second to get a quick bearing on the terrain. Someone yelled, then someone else, but it was too late. They hit a ridge-only a foot high. The Arrow upended, skittering across the ice, leaving at first a thin but then ever-widening wake of frothing arterial blood.

  In the third Arrow, the Delta driver, Lou Salvini, caught a glance, but despite what he saw he didn’t hesitate and closed the gap, the three of them now heading straight for Port Baikal.

  The submariner in Robert Brentwood’s Arrow, the man who would have to take over Rogers’s sonar job if they made it, did all he could not to throw up when he spotted what looked like a sodden black-red mop: Rogers’s head, rolling obscenely across the ice, a gray spaghettilike substance trailing it. O’Reilly was still, his neck broken.

  David was waving to the Hind coming to investigate, its bug eyes growing by the second. They were all waving. The Hind made a low pass and went into a left turn for another look-see.

  “Smile, yo
u Welsh bastard!” Aussie yelled at Choir above the roar of the Arrow. “Smile at the fucking comrades.” Choir waved, forcing a dour Welsh grin into something more gregarious looking while flipping the safety off the M-19 that he didn’t like. “What’s the bloody vertical on this?” he shouted at Aussie, his smile widening.

  “ ‘Bout thirty degrees,” said David.

  “That’s a lot of—” He waved at the comrades again as the chopper passed overhead. Port Baikal, now six miles away, was clearly visible, a mirage of it looming out on the ice far to their right. They were bucking a head wind now, flowing southward in advance of the forecasted blizzard over four hundred miles due north. David Brentwood glanced at his watch, the speedometer needle quivering between fifty-five and sixty. The Port Baikal old dock was clearly visible, but they wouldn’t reach it for another seven to ten minutes. The most important thing was to go straight to the railway tunnel that was two hundred yards to the left of the hotel and library.

  Aussie tried to get a bead on the tunnel and dock, but the vibration against the Stinger tube was giving him a headache. He passed it to Choir who had spotted the slipway — a concave, smooth but definitely gutterlike depression, about ten to fifteen feet wide, that led, like a gradual slide from the mouth of the tunnel to the spread of ice-free water by the dock where the Angara River began its exit from the lake.

  * * *

  Nefski’s subordinate wasn’t the first to see the approaching snow vehicles, which he thought were some kind of snegovoy traktor— “snowmobile”—but rather he was the one the guard called over, wondering what they were. Ivan went to the big stand holding Schneider 11 x 80 power binoculars by the tunnel’s entrance, morosely pulled the canvas cover up, and bent forward to adjust the focus. A blur of dots snapped into sharp relief against the ice.

  “Ours, I guess,” he said disinterestedly, without taking a second look, still nursing the bitter fight he’d had with his wife and generally feeling pretty sorry for himself. “Haven’t seen snowmobiles like that before, though.” Then again, he told the other guard, they certainly made as much racket. It wasn’t until another three minutes had passed that, his mind off his wife for a moment, he told his comrade grumpily, “Better tell the duty officer. Who’s on?”