Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  * * *

  Once in the cover of the taiga, Choir immediately reduced speed; even so he almost wiped out the Arrow against a snow-covered stump. Driving more slowly now, the noise much decreased, absorbed by the snow-thick forest, he stopped the engine and listened for the other Arrow. There was no sound but the mounting fury of the blizzard. This was where, Choir knew, their SAS/Delta training paid off, a regular soldier’s forced march merely a morning run for them.

  Choir took off his sunglasses and looked at his compass. “ Six miles to the choppers,” he said. “How you holdin’ up, boyo?”

  Lawson didn’t answer.

  “Hey,” said Choir, “you all right?” There was still no answer. Choir unbuckled, leaned forward over the driver’s column, and felt for the Delta man’s carotid artery. It was beating, slowly but steadily. Lawson had a babylike expression on his face.

  “You bastard!” said the normally polite Choir. With Aussie’s second morphine shot in him, Lawson had been blissfully out of it all the way across the ice.

  * * *

  It didn’t take him long, but by the time Robert Brentwood got into the SCUBA suit that was the fold-down bunk’s mattress, his face was glistening with perspiration and the approaching blip of the other sub was much larger on the screen, now being only nine hundred yards — a half mile — away. Brentwood spat into the SCUBA helmet’s face mask, rubbing the spittle around on it so as to prevent condensation.

  * * *

  “Nice shooting!” David told Aussie, watching the faint glimmer of the Hind’s debris burning as he helped Salvini lift the M-60 from the Arrow’s nose.

  “Thanks, mate,” Aussie told David. “Wasn’t a bad shot at that. Now all we have to do is walk to the choppers.”

  “What d’you say?” asked Salvini. “Must be eleven to twelve miles?”

  “Nearer eleven,” said Aussie, “as the crow flies. Everybody up to it?”

  “No worries, mate,” said Salvini, borrowing the Aussie’s accent.

  “ ‘Sat a fact, mate? A dozen Foster’s you’re the first to beg— beg for tiffin.”

  “Is she any good?”

  “Tea break!” responded Aussie. “Tiffin’s a tea break. Fuck a duck! Don’t you Yanks know anything?” Aussie zipped up the Haskins case and gave his boot to the Stinger’s sight, rendering it virtually useless. They could carry only so much.

  “Hey,” said Salvini, “you’re travelin’ light. This M-60 weighs a ton, man. Plus I’ve got the two oh three,” he added, slapping the grenade-launcher barrel on his personnel M-16.

  “Oh, tell the about it, Salvini,” said Aussie, shouldering the sniper rifle case.

  “Knock it off, you two,” said David Brentwood. “We’re not into the woods yet and We’ve got—”

  “Shush!” It was Aussie. “You hear that?”

  All Brentwood and Salvini could hear was the blizzard, its cold dropping the temperature another ten degrees to minus forty, turning their perspiration to ice — a major danger, even to the Arctic-trained commandos. You had to keep moving, cool off gradually, otherwise the perspiration could encase you, despite the layers, in a sheath of ice. Hypothermia could set in without you knowing it. You’d start to feel peculiarly warm, slow, and comfortable, the agony of frost nip passing through frostbite and then — to nothingness.

  “Can’t be anything,” said David to Aussie’s inquiry, though he was conscious his ears were still ringing from the battle.

  “A motor?” proffered Salvini, still hearing only the blizzard.

  “Nah,” said Aussie. “ ‘S gone now.” They started off, Aussie pulling back his parka’s Velcro mouth guard then ripping the wrapper from a Hershey bar. As far as he was concerned, it was the only good part of the rations. “Thought I heard a dog.”

  “Sure you didn’t fart?” asked Salvini.

  “Oh, very droll. Very fucking—”

  “Shut up!” ordered David. “Save your energy.” They had a minimum of eleven miles with heavy pack. They should make it in less than two hours, providing they kept a strict east-northeast heading. David slipped the compass string about his neck, not standard marching procedure but he didn’t want to veer off the 22.5-degree heading by even a few yards. He would need to glance at the compass often without having to dig into his pockets, letting in the frigid air.

  * * *

  As Robert Brentwood sat in the pitch darkness of the five-foot-diameter, six-foot-high escape hatch, the luminescent glow of the pressure gauge became visible only when the escape chamber was already half full of water. The surge was less violent now than the initial rush of water, but he was still uncomfortable. Compared to his last semiannual “submarine survival” update course in the Norfolk, Virginia, water tank, the claustrophobia he was suffering now was markedly more severe. He hadn’t suffered from it when he first joined the navy — it had crept up on him over the years, the fear kept at bay in the much larger nuclear subs. But even there it had become exacerbated after he had lost the USS Roosevelt off Iceland. Now, six hundred feet below the two-to-four-feet-thick ice roof, the sense of claustrophobia was pressing in on him.

  The temperature of the water swirling about his neck was only two degrees or so above freezing, shocking his system until the microslim water layer between the Arctic SCUBA suit and his skin could steady the heat exchange ratio. His body’s thermostat adjusted as he kept clenching and unclenching his fingers in the tight yet spongy rubber gloves. He told himself, forced himself, to be calm, feeling only an inch or so away from sheer terror as the water level reached the base of the SCUBA helmet and began creeping up, covering the visor. He counted slowly, as he had habitually done during the yearly prostate examination, the naval doctor impatiently ordering otherwise imperturbably calm officers not to stiffen up. “Relax the sphincter, man. Relax, damn it!”

  Then the gauge, as well as the cessation of the rushing water, told him he could now open the top hatch. The moment he’d done so he felt his body rising effortlessly, the flippers grazing the hatch edge, his breathing still too fast — the visor, despite the spittle precaution, suddenly misting at the shock of seeing the other GST only sixty feet away. While stilled in neutral buoyancy, its bow had a slight up angle, its fat teardrop shape outlined in the blackness by beads of phosphorescent freshwater plankton, first cousins of the kind that gave sea waves their luminescence even on the darkest night. Unhesitatingly looping the basket he’d made from his T-shirt under the knife scabbard so as to prevent its sinking should he be buffeted by an upwelling, he swam, arms by his side, straight for the GST, struck by the irony that, though he would show up on the enemy’s sonar as a very discernible blip, his shape like the seal he’d fired upon, they would be as confused as he had been.

  It was only then that he saw what could only be a raft, its outline, for some inexplicable reason, only partially delineated here and there by phytoplankton. It looked to be about thirty feet square, half as long as the GST itself, its neutral buoyancy assured by what must obviously be depth-sensitive floats.

  Exhilarated by the discovery of how it was that the midget subs were in effect hauling their own torpedo and cruise missile resupply, the raft probably holding eight missiles at least — two salvos’ worth, in addition to the four already on the GST — it took him only a minute to swim to the raft.

  About to place a lump of C-4 plastique from the T-shirt basket, he felt a U shackle, about five-eighths inch in diameter, he guessed, connecting the cables between the enemy GST and its raft. Using the handle spike on the end of his knife he unscrewed it and immediately felt the raft moving away from him. Now it could not act as a flotation platform for the GST. Next Brentwood turned his attention to the GST.

  Within ten feet of the sub, he noticed the curved phosphorescent outline of the GST break, as if a string of pearls had been cut, most of the microscopic creatures disappearing as quickly as they must have alighted on the midget submarine. Without their guiding light he slowed, not wanting to bump into the hull but ra
ther stand off it. Feeling the long, horizontal, stovepipe shape of one of the cruise missiles, he looped the T-shirt basket about its twenty-one-inch-diameter mouth, tying the basket tightly. Next, he pushed the basket’s “goodies,” as Johnson had referred to the centrex plastique, hard between the mouth of the cruise and the algae-slicked metal of the V-weld that connected the cruise tube to the pressure hull.

  Making sure, purely by feel, that the six-inch-long detonator was firmly embedded in the plastique, he turned the timer knob sharply counterclockwise, feeling the soft click. Glancing back, he saw his own sub clearly outlined by the phosphorescent phytoplankton. He turned and, kicking hard, started back to the sub, then felt a vibration behind him to his right. He turned to see a spume of luminescent bubbles erupting behind him from the hatch of the enemy GST. The trail of bubbles then abruptly changed from the vertical to the horizontal as the attacker, his knife trailing a secondary stream of bubbles, came straight at him.

  It was all confusion, but instinctively Brentwood’s left arm shot for the thinner trail to grab the knife arm. Somehow he missed and felt a warm sensation deep in his left shoulder where the blade had sliced open his SCUBA suit, cutting him deeply. Quickly he thrust his left hand forward again, felt something solid, and drove his knife forward, feeling it go into something soft then hard, the blade rebounding on bone. He gripped his knife’s handle harder, ripping hard left, opening the attacker’s stomach.

  Brentwood felt himself being dragged down, the attacker’s body limp, jerking spasmodically now and then. The grasp on Brentwood’s left arm was like steel. With nine minutes left on the ten-minute detonator, his mind’s eye filled with a vision of being pulled down into the countless layers of diarrheA-1ike mud. He pulled his knife back and thrust forward again. But there was no need; as suddenly as it had taken hold, the Siberian’s grip relaxed, the life drained out of him.

  Breaststroking and kicking with all his might, Brentwood made his way back to his GST’s hatch and three minutes later was inside the escape chamber, rapping the top of the bottom hatch with his right hand as he began turning the wheel of the top hatch with his left. But now his left hand cramped as he squatted there, his body crouched monkeylike. He switched to the right hand to close the top hatch, his left arm simply refusing to obey his brain, the nerves of the shoulder numb.

  He heard and felt the quiet whirr of the GST’s battery going for “burst” speed of seventeen knots which, in the next five minutes, would have them just over a mile and a half away. Brentwood had to stay cramped in the water-filled cubbyhole of the conning tower, as any siphoning of power from the battery to pump out the water would be power taken from the prop. He would have to wait until Johnson figured they were far enough away from the impending explosion before he could start the pump to vent the water in the escape hatch. In severe pain now, Brentwood remained crouched, sincerely hoping that neither Lopez nor Johnson would accidentally bump the “up scope” switch.

  As the GST slowed and the venting of the escape chamber began, the water level dropped rapidly, and Brentwood almost drowned, knocked unconscious for a moment, his head lolling dangerously as the midget sub itself trembled violently from he shock wave of the detonation over a mile away.

  The explosion, as Brentwood hoped it would, had set off a cruise warhead on the enemy sub, the resulting “Varoomph!” heard for miles, sending an enormous spume of ice shards skyward above the broken surface of the lake, as well as shattering the Siberian GST into thousands of pieces, the noise reaching Brentwood’s GST two seconds later. It stunned the three men; Lopez, though he’d plugged his ears, was unable to hear Johnson’s order for him to disengage battery power and go to diesel, heading at 15.9 knots for the northern quadrant a hundred and ninety miles away, their ETA depending on the currents and the time taken to intercept the loose raft — the latter, clearly visible on the sonar screen, having deflected some of the explosion’s sound waves.

  * * *

  “Why do we need it, sir?” asked Johnson, who believed, correctly, that now his skipper was wounded he, Johnson, would have to be the one to go out through the hole and attach the raft to them.

  “We can reload our empty torpedo tubes,” explained Brentwood, his voice heavy, slow — still groggy from his ordeal, now and men grimacing from Lopez’s inexpert dressing of his wound. “Easy enough to do with two of you,” continued Brentwood. Lopez looked alarmed. “Subsurface float buoy’s,” added Brentwood, “on the raft. Just push her over to our sub and shackle her to the ring bolt.”

  At one point Brentwood almost passed out from the pain and only then, albeit reluctantly, agreed to lie down on the lower bunk.

  “You think the other two GSTs up north’ll still be there?” asked Johnson.

  “No reason why they shouldn’t be,” answered Brentwood. “All they’ve seen is an explosion on their sonar screen,” he explained. “They’ll figure one of their GSTs has fallen victim to a malfunction — internally caused explosion. There’ll be no sign of an external attack. Anyway, even if they suspect there was and come looking for us, all the better for us. Either way, we’ll find one another.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Though he knew precisely where they were by virtue of his GPS unit, Choir couldn’t help the wounded Lawson get any closer to the chopper camp unless he was willing to go the last mile by Arrow — something that David Brentwood had forbidden anyone to do for fear that, no matter how small the possibility, it might draw an enemy patrol to the hidden choppers. As a safety precaution, the last mile was to be on foot. This being impossible for Lawson, despite the lingering effect of the morphine shots, he and Choir decided it would be quicker and safer for Choir to go on ahead to the choppers and on the way out, the Stallion, on infrared, could lower a harness for Lawson. Brentwood, Aussie, and Salvini would, if they’d made it across the ice, find their own way through the taiga to the helos.

  Before Choir left, he slit open Lawson’s vapor-barrier boot. The Delta commando’s foot was in bad shape from the deep slash of the cable, a piece of rusted, grotesquely twisted wire that had passed through the soft calf into his ankle still in place, scraping against the bone. With the morphine wearing off, Choir knew that what the doctors and nurses back in Dutch Harbor would call “discomfort” would soon set in with a vengeance. It meant that without another shot of morphine, Lawson, despite his Delta training and all the will in the world, would be unable to keep quiet, let alone put any weight on the foot. Choir pulled out the white/green winter camouflage net from beneath the Arrow’s seat and tossed it over the vehicle, propping Lawson up so that the butt of the M-60 rested in his lap with another shot of morphine by his side and an MRE with its regulation 4,200 calories for winter conditions also within easy reach. “Enjoy your picnic,” joked Choir, tapping Lawson encouragingly on the shoulder. “And remember, boyo, drink your four liters.”

  “How’ll I piss?”

  “Aim high,” said Choir, smiling for the first time that day. “Listen, boyo, if I don’t make it back to you, take the chance and go active with your finder beeper, but give the two hours. Don’t want the Sibirs homing in on the beep if we can help it.”

  “I’ll wait,” said Lawson. “You’ll be back.”

  Choir, with one last glance at his GPS, started off for the choppers, which he knew were now a mile away. He didn’t go in a straight line, using instead SAS “rabbit” zigzags and back tracks, crouching, absolutely still, listening to detect the slightest untoward noise within the rushing-river sound of the blizzard in the high timber as fresh powder snow started to fall. Passing down through the heavy drifts on the bank of a snaking frozen river, Choir scanned left to right for signs of any footprints or vehicle tracks and took another GPS fix. The choppers should now be no more than a hundred yards ahead, but damned if he could see them, his vision obliterated by either trees or the camouflage nets or—

  Then he spotted the nose of one of the Cobras, and as he got nearer, experienced the pleasant fright of reco
gnition as the bigger, almost brutish, shape of the Super Stallion became distinguishable under the snow-dusted net. At twenty yards he stopped and knelt down to make sure no one was following him. Nothing stirred but the blizzard.

  He waited a full five minutes, watching. Something was wrong. He couldn’t smell it or see it, but his sixth sense told him. As sure as a mother detects the slightest change of rhythm in her baby’s sleep in an otherwise noisy house, he knew that something was amiss. For a start there should have been some sign of movement around the choppers, their crews surely as anxious, hearing the distant gunfire, to see the returning SAS/Delta men as they would be to see the chopper crews. Yet, peculiarly, he didn’t sense a trap.

  Silently, his slow movements completely muffled by the blizzard, he eased forward a few yards and stopped again, noticing what looked like a patch of oil, its coloration and form different from the folds of snow about him. Then he saw it was a canteen shape. He was in a minefield.

  Without moving an inch, without blinking, he stared at the choppers, knowing that everyone inside had either been taken prisoner or killed. Whatever an enemy patrol had done, securing the open area by circling it with a ring of antipersonnel mines, they had now gone, not staying with the choppers when they had heard the firing down by the lake, and obviously not having blown the choppers up for fear of drawing attention to themselves. Turning, retracing his footsteps precisely, Choir made his way back through the trees, his earlier footsteps still visible enough that he could avoid stamping on any new ground. After a quarter mile or so he paused, waited, and, sensing no danger, moved on, till, to his immense relief, he spotted the Arrow.

  Lawson’s throat had been cut, his snow-veiled stare silent testimony to the utter surprise and horror with which it had happened, so much blood around the Arrow that it looked like a spill of pink algae, the snowfall diluting the dark red.