Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  “Nefski.”

  “Shit! You tell ‘im. I don’t want him to see this.” He pointed to his black eye. “Bastard’ll put the on punishment.”

  The other man slung his rifle and walked over the hard-crusted snow, his breath going before him like steam as he made his way toward Nefski’s office in the old library.

  “Colonel, sir. There looks like a patrol coming in.”

  Nefski was alarmed. Despite the fact that they were hundreds of miles from the most forward troops of the U.S. Second Army, he was immediately suspicious. He didn’t know of any patrols supposed to be coming in. “Call out the squad!”

  “Yes, sir,” said the guard, walking outside to start the siren. Begi!”— “Run!” ordered Nefski. “There are two subs in, you idiot!” Before the Klaxon began its long wail, Nefski had grabbed the phone from its cradle and was pushing the red button for the dock. “How long till you leave?”

  ‘We’re almost ready now, Colonel. Be about another—”

  “Get them into the water — now! Move!” shouted Nefski.

  “But, sir, some of the men are over in the hotel…”

  “I don’t care. We don’t have the time. Get the winches moving. I’ll call the ho—” The library wall was disappearing in front of his eyes, forty-millimeter grenades ripping, tearing it open like a pull-tab on a beer carton, debris flying everywhere.

  “Bogomater!”— “Mother of God!” He fell to the floor, the phone banging beside him, its Bakelite cracked beyond repair, his nose bleeding. Luckily through the dangling earpiece he could hear the phone in the hotel ringing three times.

  “Hotel-”

  “Colonel Nefski. Tell all the submariners to get back to the tunnel immediately. You understand?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Tell them!” he screamed. The next moment the line was hissing like a samovar.

  * * *

  In the tunnel a skeleton crew of four men worked like navvies at the winches that would let down one of the fifty-foot-long by fifteen-foot-wide toroidal subs, its eight “anti-lake-access” torpedoes looking for all the world like stovepipes attached to its superstructure, the bulges of the four cruise missiles wider but shorter on the outer casing.

  The first sub was a quarter of the way down the hundred-yard ice slipway; retractable wing vanes extended from either side of the black, egg-shaped sub like the outriggers of a canoe to stop the midget from rolling before it reached the water. The four Siberians working the winch, not realizing that it wasn’t the sub that was under fire but rather the library and hotel, frantically redoubled their efforts — a line of twenty to thirty KGB border guards racing toward the slipway. Behind them came the squeak of a tank heading down from its defilade position on the steep forested slope along the narrow road leading westward from the town.

  There were screams of men hit, one flung backward like a rag doll under the impact of the forty-millimeter, while at the far end of the tunnel, the two-man Goryonov 7.62-millimeter machine-gun crew were dead, one slumped over the gun, the other, his face missing, flung back over the sandbags by the rail tracks that had carried the midget submarines the last few miles to the slipway. There was more screaming now, mixed with a sound like wasps swarming as the three Arrows surged up the incline from the lake, stopping about twenty yards abreast, close to a heavy ice bank that formed the eastern wall of the slipway. The line of border guards fifty yards ahead across the slipway and now slightly above them poured fire in their general direction. David Brentwood, hard up against the ice wall, smacked Choir’s shoulder hard so that he’d feel it through the Kevlar vest. “Get the M-19 off the Arrow and on its bipod. Aussie, three o’clock high!”

  Aussie Lewis looked up, squinting despite the shades, and saw the twin bubble nose of the Hind rising from behind the hotel into the sun, its pilot now realizing it had been an enemy force they’d seen on the lake.

  The chopper, relying on the glare to blind its opponents, was in Aussie’s line of sight for only three seconds — the time it took him to fire the Stinger from two hundred yards, which was virtually point-blank range. The explosion was crimson, spilling fiery fuel down around the hotel, some of the gasoline sweeping across four or five of its defenders, sending them screaming, rolling into the trench behind the border guards’ ice wall, distracting their comrades and kicking up so much ice and snow in their efforts to douse themselves that two of the three Delta men had no difficulty lobbing six grenades in as many seconds, the grenades’ flashes lost in the sunlight but going off deep in the trench, killing at least another three defenders.

  The sub, passing down the slipway between them and the defenders, was nearing the water.

  “Stop those bastards!” yelled Aussie, swinging the Stinger to his left at the men working the winch and executing his own command before any of the other S/D men needed to. Two of the winchmen simply disappeared under the rocket’s impact; what was left of them splattered over the remaining submarine. Aussie reloaded, got a bead on the second sub in the tunnel, and heard Robert Brentwood shouting, “No! Let’s be sure of the first one before we—”

  “Roger!” said Aussie and, turning right, fired the Stinger round into the hotel, a hundred yards front right, just to keep things moving. The next instant he heard a “thwack!” and one of the Delta men, a moment before spread-eagled atop the ice wall for a better shot, was tumbling backward, grabbing at his throat, but there was no hope. The jugular severed, he was spurting blood in jets, tumbling into the slipway, sliding all the way down, smashing into the midget sub’s keel. But by now the defenders, thoroughly demoralized, were retreating to the library as David Brentwood, attaching three “bread rolls”—balls of plastique — on the cable leading from the winch to the sub, pushed in a pencil-size detonator and flicked the fuse selector to “three minutes.”

  “Off you go!” he told Robert and, without a look backward, Robert Brentwood and the two remaining submariners slithered down the gutter-shaped slipway, using their boots to brake themselves against the keel, one of them already with a hand on the right side vane to haul himself up to the six-foot, oil-drum-shaped conning tower.

  “Not yet!” Robert Brentwood ordered the seaman. “Not till the charge goes. Get forward of midships. Otherwise when that cable blows it’ll—” It blew, the sudden release of tension recoiling one half of the wire back to the winch, making a high, singing noise, the other half whipping toward the sub but catching Lawson, one of the Delta men, and almost severing his right foot. For a second or so he felt absolutely no pain, only astonishment, realizing that in breaking the impact of the wire, he’d saved the life of one of the two submariners with Robert Brentwood. The cable smacked the keel, flopping to the icy slipway and finally lying still, like a dead snake.

  The sub was now afloat with Robert Brentwood and the two submariners already down the conning tower. The powerful whiff of sweat assaulted Brentwood’s nose, and for a split second he thought one of the winchmen was hiding in the sub; but there was no one, the sub simply not having had enough time to be aerated by the cold pine smell of the taiga.

  By now Choir and the remaining Delta man, Salvini, had the M-19 on its stand and were pouring a terrible fire into the library and hotel. Aussie rested the Stinger tube across the Arrow’s cockpit for a good shot at the second sub. There was a “swoosh” of back blast from the Stinger, a crimson explosion in the tunnel, and a ringing of scrap metal. That GST was gone.

  Once inside the midget submarine it was easier than Robert Brentwood and his two crewmen thought it would be. They didn’t need to know anything about the Cyrillic alphabet, the dials self-explanatory to any submariner. The three men moved automatically to the stations they’d have to operate as a skeleton crew. For them, the sensation was very much like moving from a fully automatic automobile to a VW Beetle with standard shift. It was all more or less clear at a glance, the only real difference being the pipes that went round and round the toroidal hull, which allowed for the storage of recyc
led gaseous oxygen for them to breathe; it also ran the GST’s closed-circuit diesel engine.

  The immediate concern was to submerge as quickly as possible. “Hatch closed!” said Johnson, one of the two remaining submariners. The other man, Lopez, stood by the diesel motor control and steerage levers that would allow him to work the relatively primitive yet effective horizontal hydroplanes that would govern their “up” and “down” angles, and the vertical rudder, half above, half below the horizontal plane, to control the yaw, or left-right movement.

  “Very well,” Brentwood responded to Johnson. Turning to Lopez, he ordered, “Stand by to discharge.”

  “Stand by to discharge, sir.”

  Brentwood switched on the small sonar screen by the narrow twin day and nighttime periscopes column, no bigger than six inches in diameter, and checked there was no obstruction ahead or below registered by the “passive” radar sensors that were built into the GST’s hull.

  “Dive! Dive! Dive! Open all vents!” he commanded.

  “Opening all vents, aye, sir!” responded Johnson, and they could hear the water rushing and gurgling in, its noise transmitted through the pressure hull. Lopez immediately put her nose into a sharp dive, Brentwood wrapping an arm around the scope column as the GST went down on a twenty-degree incline.

  “Twenty feet… thirty feet… forty feet…” announced Johnson unhurriedly, rhythmically, multiplying the readout in meters by three, already getting the feel of her.

  “Level at one hundred,” ordered Brentwood.

  “Level at one hundred, aye, sir… Forty feet… forty-five…” They could hear the icy growl above them as huge plates shifted. The slight movement was unnoticeable to the naked eye, but it was in part a response to the enormous struggle, the pulling apart of tectonic plates far below the five-thousand-foot lake which caused fissures that accounted for the temperature inversions throughout the lake and gave rise often to the fast, warm, upstreaming currents that created thin ice here and there.

  “Seventy feet… eighty feet…”

  “Stand by to declutch.”

  “Stand by to—” began Lopez.

  “Declutch!” ordered Brentwood, and within three seconds Lopez had levelled the tiny sub, though it was rocking slightly, and disengaged the generating power from the diesel that had been charging up the batteries, shifting the power to propulsion charge. All three of them were surprised by the lack of any forward sensation other than levelling out. It was an extraordinarily quiet vessel.

  “Steer one one two,” ordered Brentwood.

  “One one two, sir.”

  “Half ahead,” ordered Brentwood.

  “Half ahead, sir.” Within five seconds they were running at eight knots. Brentwood, for the first time in the mission, relaxed slightly, nodding his head in admiration at the other two, his mood taken up by Johnson, who, watching the pressure gauges, announced, “That old Italian, Santi, designed it good, eh, Captain?”

  “The Siberians built it,” said Brentwood, “but you’re right. We have us a good craft, gentlemen. Even so, ‘fraid it’s going to be hard going with only three of us. At the most only one of us can catch a nap now and then.”

  “No sweat, sir,” answered Johnson. Lopez gave a diplomatic smile.

  “How deep’s this lake again, sir?” asked Johnson.

  “Goes to six thousand,” answered Brentwood. “Eight thousand square miles of ice above us, gentlemen — eight thousand square miles of mud — accumulated silt — beneath us.” They could hear a popping and then a crackling sound — the battle, not abating, still going on at dockside. The noises of the odd grenade or round striking the ice-free entrance — the outflow of the Angara River — sped through the frigid water at over four times the speed they would in the air.

  “Sir?” It was Johnson up forward.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve just noticed there’s a second hatch here. We were in such a hurry getting down I just automatically—”

  “That’s all right,” said Brentwood, but he was puzzled, even as he told Johnson to secure the second hatch. Before it closed, however, he spied a small pressure gauge, the size of an alarm clock, on the side of the five-foot-wide, six-foot-high conning tower and realized it was an airlock that could be flooded and pumped out, if need be.

  “Well, good old Santi!” said Johnson. “Escape hatch and all, eh, Skipper?”

  “Yes,” said Brentwood, about to bring up the painfully obvious fact that — in his opinion at least — building an escape hatch, taking up extra space in the already-crowded midget, had been a waste of good material. If a torpedo hit the midget submarine anywhere, he doubted there’d be enough time for anyone to make the airlock. Besides which it would take awhile, once the bottom hatch was secured, to bleed in water through the top hatch, allowing the escaping submariner to pop out and close the hatch so that it could then be pumped empty for the next man — providing you had at least one of the three pumps working after a torpedo attack. By that time the sub would be below its crush depth of around two thousand feet. The slightest hairline fracture then would create an aerosol inside the sub coming in at over a thousand pounds per square inch, such a force imploding the sub flatter than a sumo wrestler sitting on a paper cup.

  The passive sonar sensors were operating at full strength, their nine green lights on without a flicker. It was the first moment of silence that they’d had in the mission; Johnson only now had time to look around for the toilet. After the sheer fright of the firelight on the shore, he felt like his bladder was going to burst. “Where’s the head?”

  “Right under me,” said Lopez, pointing to the waste chamber. “They thought of everything, Captain. Guy on steerage doesn’t have to go far to take a leak.”

  “No one has far to go in here,” said Johnson, looking about the instrument-cluttered sub, so jam-packed with equipment that it was virtually impossible for two men to pass at once. There were only two six-foot-long, two-foot-wide, fold-down plank bunks, whose mattresses were made up of two spread-out SCUBA “Arctic escape” diving suits, the two SCUBA helmets and relatively small, champagne-bottle-size oxygen tanks fixed to the bulkhead only four inches from the nose of whoever used the top bunk for a nap. “Everything in this damn thing’s so small,” complained Johnson, looking at the small 02 tanks.

  “Well, don’t worry,” said Brentwood. “Hopefully we won’t have to use them.”

  The temperature in the sub was sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but with each man wearing four layers of winter-battle uniform, it felt like a sauna bath. Brentwood set the lead by stripping down to his long Johns; the problem was where to stow even the tightly rolled, sleeping-bag-size bundles of uniform. Lopez sat on one, and they jury-rigged the other two forward and aft of the scope column, Brentwood inspecting the lashings to make sure there was no possibility that the six-inch-diameter day scope, or smaller three-inch night scope, would have any chance of being snagged. The first thing they found out was that while the heat exchange and scrubbing system above the GST took good care of the oxygen, it did what Johnson called “sweet FA” for human sweat. He only hoped it would deal better with the human waste tank under Lopez. They couldn’t risk venting it for fear the sound might give their position away as they began their search for the three other submarines, whose four cruise missile salvos had brought Freeman’s Second Army to a standstill.

  One of the nine thimble-size sonar sensor lights was blinking amber, and on the screen they could see “a little dancing,” as Rogers would have called it. Johnson turned up the magnification, giving Brentwood the scale. But even on maximum enlarge, the “dancing” was too small to signify any threat, and Brentwood guessed they were getting tiny “flits” of sound from the gobmianka— “fish”—that were indigenous to the lake and whose eyes, taking up a third of their nine-inch body, could give off a signal. Each female gave birth to around seventeen hundred small ones each fall, and their schools were capable of giving off a boat-size “echo.” The “dancing�
�� had disappeared.

  “Wonder how the boys are doin’ up there?” asked Johnson.

  “Hope they’re out by now,” said Lopez. “I sure as hell wouldn’t—” He stopped, in deference to Robert Brentwood. Brentwood looked at his watch. “If they can get back in the taiga around there, around Port Baikal, and wait it out till dark, which should be around three p.m. at this latitude, they’ll have a good chance, I think.”

  “Yeah,” said Lopez, nodding in agreement, but it was more wishful thinking than conviction.

  “They’ll be fine,” said Johnson.

  “Yeah.” It was a small thing, Robert Brentwood hardly ever saying “yeah,” but in the close confines of the midget submarine such informality came much more naturally, and was almost necessary, in his view, if they were to work well as a team.

  “One of us should take an hour’s nap at a time,” he told Johnson and Lopez, “so that—”

  On the sonar screen there was a large blip that had appeared very suddenly, the magnification showing that it was moving at over thirty knots. It was heading straight for the GST.

  “Bearing?” asked Brentwood.

  “Zero three three, sir,” answered Johnson.

  It was on their left quarter.

  “Range,” added Johnson, “three thousand yards and closing.”

  Lopez was tense at the steerage position, keeping an eye on the sonar screen which he couldn’t see clearly for Brentwood.

  “Speed,” announced Johnson, “we got… Jesus! Thirty-two knots!”

  Robert Brentwood glanced at the knot meter. The GST had a maximum of only sixteen knots submerged. It couldn’t be one of the three GSTs — had to be a torpedo. The sonar lights were blinking red.

  “Two thousand yards and closing. Time to impact…” Johnson began.

  “Bring the ship to zero zero niner,” ordered Brentwood, adding, “Firing point procedures. Master zero one four. Tube one.”