by Ian Slater
“Firing point procedures, master one four. Tube one,” came Johnson’s confirmation immediately, followed by, “Solution ready, sir. Weapon ready. Ship ready.”
There was no panic; this was their “line of country.”
Brentwood watched the bearing, corrected the heading, and announced, “Final bearing and shoot. Master one five.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The T-80 squeaking its way noisily on the narrow road that crossed the tracks leading to the dock couldn’t see the Americans firing from beneath the high ice bank that led up sharply from the shoreline. One second there was a burst of submachine gun fire far left at the tank, then at ten yards farther right the tank gunner saw the fiery tongue of the heavy American M-19 machine gun. It was the M-19 that the T-80 driver took a precise bead on: 203.1 meters, just over two hundred yards away, but the next moment the tank’s laser sight was knocked out by a burst of the bullet-grenades from the American M-19. The T-80 emitted a cantankerous, bearlike growl, its turret slewing as it backed up a few feet for a better defilade position, lowering its bulk for a slighter silhouette, the laser sighting gone. But at two hundred yards the Siberians in the tank, manning the 12.7-millimeter and 7.62-millimeter machine guns and the main 125-millimeter cannon, knew that if they couldn’t knock out the American weapon they ought to be sent back to Novosibirsk gunnery school. The tank belched, the shell’s explosion throwing earth-rooted ice blocks high into the air, creating a wide, jagged, U-shaped gap in the ice wall. But Aussie, Choir, and David Brentwood, knowing what would happen the moment the T-80’s turret had stopped and hearing the whine of the barrel depressing, had abandoned the heavy M-19 machine gun.
They had rejoined Salvini, who was fighting by the three parked Arrows, the latter’s noses hidden by the ice bank. The other wounded Delta commando, Lawson, had dragged himself into the cockpit of one of the Arrows where Salvini was now hurriedly giving him a second shot of morphine, not realizing Aussie had already given him one a few seconds after the wire had sliced into his ankle. Lawson’s leg, elevated to help staunch the bleeding, was now sticking out of the Arrow’s open cockpit, the plastic bubble having been detached to accommodate him, the leg looking like a short log with the four layers of thermal clothing and the ankle now swollen to three times its size.
As they looked down at the gap in the ice wall, the five remaining members of the SAS/Delta team saw that the M-19 and the Arrow it had been mounted on were no more. The crash of a 125-millimeter shell from the T-80 was still smoking and remnants of the M-19 were still skittering across the ice near the frozen lake’s edge. The Arrow was completely gone, except for its skirting, which was wobbling across the ice like a drunken punctured tire from some enormous bicycle.
By now Salvini had lined up his LAW 80—light antitank launcher — and fired it, the round hitting the tank’s sloped composite armor a glancing blow. Nevertheless, the relatively slow-velocity HEAT round did damage, its molten jet of white-hot steel squirting a tadpole-shape inside the tank. They could hear one of the Siberians screaming inside, saw the slewing turret suddenly stop, and waited for the explosions from the rounds stored by the gunner even as they kept the remainder of the Port Baikal KGB border troops from raising their heads or taking too much comfort from the arrival of the T-80.
Salvini was loading another LAW round as David ordered the withdrawal, sure now that the midget sub under his brother’s command must be well and truly away under the protection of the thick ice. “Choir, you drive the first Arrow with Lawson aboard. We can’t get anyone in next to him with that leg of his. Aussie, you and Salvini in the second Arrow with me. I’ll—” They ducked, the whistle of mortars going overhead, crashing on the lake, splinters of ice shrapnel raining down on their helmets, a shard slicing through three layers of Aussie’s winter uniform, barely missing his carotid artery.
“I’ll drive,” continued David. “You ride shotgun,” he told Salvini. “Aussie, bring the Stinger.”
“Yes, ma’am,” shouted Salvini. He fired off another LAW round. This time it hit the glacis plate in front of the driver, penetrating the armor. At first there was only a short jet of flame from the hole but then, with David yelling for Salvini to “run,” David already in the cockpit starting the Arrow, the tank resounded with a cacophony of small-arms fire, its machine gun ammunition exploding like firecrackers. This time they heard murderous screams from the tank crew and saw the cupola flung open, a cloud of thick, white smoke issuing forth as a gunner, trying to escape, was engulfed in flame, the bulging earpieces of his Soviet-style leather tank helmet melting even as he struggled to get free. David fired a long burst from his HK submachine gun; the man was flung back. David dropped the HK into the Arrow’s cockpit beside him, his shoulder bruised and aching from the punishing recoil of the gun having been on full automatic; but it kept the Siberians’ heads down.
Aussie scrambled into the front of David’s Arrow as Choir, heading for the second Arrow, tossed his last two grenades toward the Siberian trench.
“Give ‘em a good-bye shot!” David called to Salvini who, having dumped the M-60 light machine gun into the Arrow, snatched up the LAW and fired a round at the Siberian trench. It hit the far side of the trench but in doing so threw up a thunderous, exploding wall of powder snow and ice over the entire trench. The Americans used the curtain of falling debris to head for the lake, the two Arrows hitting forty-five miles an hour as they reached its shore. One skidded slightly before righting itself in their race away from Port Baikal, the two vehicles already executing a medley of zigzags, two hundred yards apart, the crack of small-arms fire and hastily ranged mortars chipping and denting the ice behind them.
* * *
The torpedo Robert Brentwood had fired had hit nothing, running its two-mile maximum range then losing speed, sinking, disappearing into the black abyss of the lake. Renowned for its clarity, the lake gave up all light after a hundred meters or so. The torpedo soon gained momentum under the accumulating PSI, the pressure on it soon so great that it was speeding, aided by its streamlined shape, deeper and deeper. Imploding at four thousand meters, it was still heading for the bottom at over eighty miles an hour, to be lost forever somewhere in the five thousand feet of accumulated silt.
Robert Brentwood had made a mistake, one that might be excused by others as an error made under stress, but a mistake nevertheless, in firing at what he now believed must have been some kind of fish or mammal — it would have to be a seal, given its speed — its curiosity aroused and coming straight for the GST like an enemy torpedo.
“Damn! It’ll mean our torpedo’s launch will have shown up on the other three GSTs’ sonar.”
“Yeah, “said Johnson, “but, sir, there’s been no voice communication in the sound channel. We would’ve seen that on sonar. At least they’re not contacting one another, whether they heard it or not. Besides, they’d have to go to the surface to trail an aerial. For all they know, it could have been an ice charge pack — you know, one of the charges we figure they must be using to expand the thin ice patches before they launch the missiles.”
“So?” asked Lopez. “They’ll still know where we are. No way their sonar could’ve missed picking up our launch.”
Robert Brentwood now had hold of a new possibility born of Johnson’s suggestion. “Could have been an ice charge, I suppose,” he said, trying to think like the other captains aboard the three enemy GSTs. “Anyway, there’s no reason to think it was aimed at them. I mean, seeing there’s been no voice communication, they probably don’t know we’re in the lake. At least not yet.”
“We’ll soon find out,” said Johnson, pointing to the sonar scope. A blip larger than the one that had been made by what Robert Brentwood was sure must have been a seal was snowing up five thousand yards off, just over two miles away.
“Might be coming to see if we need help,” said Robert Brentwood.”Firing point procedures…” But even as he gave the order he knew that should he fire this second torpedo and it
hit the oncoming sub, the other two, probably much farther away in the northern sector of the lake, would pick up the explosions on their sonar, unless they were so far away that their sonar mikes were being blanketed by ice growl. What worried him was the possibility that Port Baikal might have gotten the message out on its radio about a sub being taken.
* * *
In fact, Port Baikal, even had it not been totally preoccupied with its self-defense, had been incapable of sending out any radio messages, the microwave dish on the top of the two-story library having shattered, crashing to the ground following one of Aussie’s Stinger rounds. The demolition had so alarmed Nefski that, afraid he might lose his prisoners before he had a chance to interrogate them, he’d ordered them removed quickly from the library across to the hotel. However, in the murderous fire that the Americans were pouring toward the library and hotel, as well as at the KGB border troop defenders, several guards and prisoners had been hit. Some, like Alexsandra Malof, were not injured at all, as prisoners and several guards broke and ran toward the woods to avoid the commandos’ fire.
Shouting through the linoleum-ripping sound of machine-gun fire, the crash of grenades, and the crack of half-a-dozen different kinds of small arms, the pilot of a Hind that had been parked behind the hotel, out of view of the S/D team, was now shouting at Nefski, asking that he be allowed to take off immediately to alert Irkutsk HQ from where, just possibly, some ad hoc underwater communication link might be rigged somewhere along the western shore of Baikal, seeing that Port Baikal’s communications had literally been shot to pieces. “Maybe they can get the message to the subs’ trailing aerials.”
The pilot could see Nefski didn’t have a clue what he meant. “The subs trail VLF — very low frequency — aerials. It’s one way to—”
“Stop them!” Nefski screamed, pointing out at the ice, his finger trembling in the direction of the escaping commandos. “Stop them, you fool, before they reach the other side of the lake!”
“It’s them or Irkutsk!” pressed the pilot resolutely, impatient with Nefski’s vengeful streak. “I can’t do both, Colonel.”
“Yes, you can!” Nefski shouted back. “It’ll only take you a few minutes to get them. Then go to Irkutsk for all I care. Get them and then break radio silence!” raged Nefski. “So what if you draw U.S. fighters to you through our AA screen.”
“Their AWACs’ll jam my message,” said the pilot angrily, seeing Nefski wouldn’t give way. “Come on then,” the pilot shouted to one of the ground crew members. “Haven’t you finished?”
“There you are, sir,” said the ground crew foreman, hastily extracting the hose and snapping the armored lid shut on the self-seal tank. “It’s full.”
“About time.”
Lifting off, he was only fifteen feet above the ground, behind the KGB troop trench. At least eleven KGB were dead or wounded, one sitting — difficult to tell whether he was actually dead or merely stunned from the concussion — not moving as the Hind passed over him, nosing higher. The pilot could now clearly see the two white triangles, twelve to fourteen miles away, heading for the other side of the lake nine miles beyond them. “Ota wnmtsy”—”They’re crafty,” he told his weapons officer below, seeing that the two Arrows — the bruised sky of the approaching blizzard racing southward — had separated well abreast of one another. There was at least a mile between them, virtually making an attack on both at precisely the same time an impossibility. “Well, we won’t play cat and mouse, Oleg,” the pilot told his weapons officer. “We’ve got lots of time. We’ll take them one by one.”
* * *
On the ice Aussie saw a fine, foglike vapor streaming behind them, but since the temperature was well below freezing he knew it couldn’t be fog. Then he got a whiff of it. “Hell! We’re leaking fuel.”
“I know,” shouted David, his eyebrows and the edges of his sunglasses caked in ice.
“What’re our chances of the Arrow reaching the other side?” called out Aussie, his voice quickly whipped away in the slipstream.
“ ‘Bout fifty-fifty,” said David. “I’ll try to take her on as straight a line as I can, use less—” There was a flapping noise, then the vapor became a cloud, the engine coughing.
“For Chrissakes!” yelled Salvini. “Gimme a break!” The Arrow’s speedometer needle quavered between fifty and forty-five, then fell to twenty, ten; then the Arrow conked out, only the air cushion sustaining it. The Arrow slid a hundred yards farther, with a snuffling noise, under the residual momentum of the now-dead fan. As they came to a stop, David Brentwood, Aussie, and Salvini saw Choir’s Arrow, with the wounded Lawson aboard, slowly pulling away from them, off to their far left. Whether or not Choir or the Delta commando looked back, they couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter, for there was only one rule in this situation and that was that Choir had to keep going. He couldn’t break radio silence to call for help either from the Cobras or the Stallion who, as Wain had pointed out before the mission, wouldn’t take off before nightfall.
“Blizzard might help us,” said David as he saw the purplish-black sky gathering power and moving rapidly southward toward them. As they alighted from the Arrow, Salvini, out of habit, took out his foot-long, saw-edged ranger knife and did a proper job on the fuel tank so the gasoline could be dispersed away from them by the wind whipping up in front of the blizzard.
“I dunno,” said Aussie, breathing hard on his gloved fingers, swearing at the frozen zipper of the Haskins case, breathing on it, then quickly extracting the rifle, and flicking out its bipod legs. “He’s gonna get one pass over us at least.” He moved left of the Arrow, Salvini using the vehicle as a rest for the M-60 light machine gun, which he swivelled so that the Arrow would give him as much protection as possible.
David had already moved out to the right, south of the Arrow, but turned west now in the direction of the oncoming blip of the Hind, the Stinger in hand, his HK submachine gun slung across his shoulder. He prayed for a “hover” shot. If he got it, it would be the Fourth of July. The chopper, however, didn’t come at them at all. Nose down, skimming the ice like an unstoppable bird of prey, it was heading instead toward the other Arrow farther on.
“Smart fucker!” Aussie called out across the ice.”He’s leaving us for friggin’ seconds.”
David had a bead on the chopper. Anticipating the track, moving the Stinger’s barrel with the missile, he fired — missing the chopper by a good one hundred yards, the round landing farther up the lake with the sound of a brown paper bag exploding. The sudden “boomp” registered on the sonar screens of Robert Brentwood’s GST and the three other submarines, two in the far north, one closing in to investigate the first sonar blip, caused by Robert Brentwood firing at the seal minutes earlier.
The sub now closed on Brentwood’s GST, its skipper assuming that the second chrysanthemum pattern on his screen-coming from close to the surface — might mean that some American armored force had reached the eastern shore of the lake. Alarmed by such a possibility but unable to find out without going to the surface for a thin ice hole, after which he’d have to trail the long VLF aerial, the captain warned the other GSTs by reverting to one of the oldest methods of communication in the world — tapping out a Morse message through the hull, the sound racing through the sound channel.
“Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Johnson said in celebration, the message itself unintelligible, but the sine waves of the message and its source clearly identified on the sonar screen. When the other two subs answered, Johnson transferred the sonar blips onto the superimposed E7 ONC — operation navigation chart. Two were in the northern section of the lake in the southwestern corner of the navigation chart’s “85” grid, one of the subs at latitude 54 degrees, 11 minutes north, longitude 109 degrees, 03 minutes west, the other twenty miles farther north.
But there was still a serious problem for Brentwood. While he now knew the exact position of the two northern subs, as well as the one heading for him, the information narro
wing his search area by over 70 percent, he knew that if he fired the torpedo at the oncoming GST the two northern subs could break out of their quadrant on battery power — silent running — and come looking for him. Then it was pure mathematics: one would fire and in order to protect himself he would have to fire back, and the second would immediately have the vector, its torpedo getting him in the cross fire.
“Johnson.”
“Yes, Captain?”
“We’re not going to fire the fish.”
“We aren’t, sir?” said Johnson, looking painfully confused.
“No. We wait. How far away is our Snoop?”
“Ten minutes.”
* * *
Choir waited till he saw the Hind spitting orange, then he turned hard right and hard right again and applied the brakes. A mistake — the Arrow spun uncontrollably on the skating-rink surface of the ice so fast that it threatened to throw the wounded Lawson out of the cockpit had it not been for the fact that he was strapped in. But it did throw the chopper’s aim off as the Hind swept low, a twin path of machine-gun bullets chopping up the ice to Choir’s left. The chopper went into a sharp climb, banking hard left in a tight turn to come back at Choir. It was only in semihover for two seconds, but it gave Aussie the time he needed, the chopper centered perfectly in the Haskins’ ten-power scope, its belly filling the cross hairs as Aussie squeezed off the armor-piercing, HE/incendiary bullet toward the Hind over a mile away. The noise of the sniper rifle was a there pop in Choir’s ear as he pulled the throttle wide open again, heading for the tree line growing bigger by the second.
The Haskins could hit a ten-gallon drum at over a mile with the ten-power scope, but the Hind was a much bigger target. The HE/incendiary tore into the chopper’s starboard gas tank like a poker through foil, the explosion barely visible to any of the SAS/Delta crew. The first squall of the blizzard had enveloped the southern end of the lake, completely swallowing Choir’s Arrow and, with the downed Hind, any hope of Irkutsk finding out about the American-crewed sub in the lake.
