Arctic Front wi-4

by Ian Slater

  His jaw tight with anger, senses bristling, Choir saw the footsteps of the Siberian patrol. There had been three — possibly four — no doubt coming round in a circle from the choppers after hearing the Arrow making its way through the woods. The Arrow’s gas tank was punctured in three or four places, the gas gone.

  Choir switched the safety off his HK-11 then began the “lope” run, the kind that, because of the high adrenaline energy it consumed — eyes, ears, trigger finger on the edge — could exhaust even the fittest commando in half an hour in the heavy snow. He heard a dog, its panting downwind of him. As it turned, one man in the group of four turned with it, but by then Choir had fired three long, rattling bursts, downing the dog and the two SPETS nearest it, the other two quickly dashing behind tall firs.

  Choir, still running, suddenly tripped on hidden roots, his vest taking the brunt of the fall, bullets whistling above where a moment before he’d stood. Now rolling over, he performed the minimum requirement of the SAS, its calling card: changing the magazine in midroll, returning fire within three seconds, not hitting either of the SPETS but keeping them behind the trees, as he also took cover behind an ice-cream-domed stump.

  One SPETS was firing, only the barrel of his AK-47 visible. Choir could hear the other moving twenty feet to his right, going down on his knees. Choir was lifting his weapon when, as if in slow motion, he glimpsed the other man’s face and the white toque he was wearing becoming one, suddenly blurring, the man’s face and scalp separating from him like torn paper as David Brentwood’s Heckler and Koch nine-millimeter Parabellum punched into him from behind, bark flying everywhere. There was another shot. This, in its singularity, was much louder, more of a “thwack” than the outraged chatter of David Brentwood’s machine gun. Aussie’s Haskins, firmly braced by the best Siberian pine, spoke only once, its HE/incendiary literally blowing the remaining SPETS’ head off, Salvini covering the rear.

  No one spoke for several minutes, all frozen in attitude, braced for the counterattack — if there was to be one — making sure that absolutely nothing else was moving. Softly Aussie told Salvini, “Told you I heard a fucking mutt!”

  They took Lawson’s dog tags but had no time to bury him. It was hardest on Choir, but it was necessary and, with only one backward glance, he moved off with the other three, telling them briefly about the choppers and the vanished crew who were no doubt dead inside them. It was up to David whether to go on and destroy the choppers but there would be the mines to negotiate — too time-consuming in itself and besides, any noise would only attract further enemy patrols. Plus the SPETS patrol could have already reported the position of the chopper to an HQ.

  “We hike,” he said simply to Choir, Aussie, and Salvini. “East-nor’east.”

  “Just what I felt like,” said Aussie somberly. “Bloody four-hundred-mile walk.”

  They never doubted they’d make it. If an SAS/Delta man couldn’t make fifty miles a day, he was loafing. It would be eight days to the forward units of Second Army who, given the GST the team had taken out in the tunnel and the explosions from the lake, must be mightily relieved at having at least the cruise salvos already cut by more than half. Besides, the four men had their weapons, two MRE’s apiece, and after what they’d been through during winter — survival course at Brecon Beacons for the SAS, the High Sierras for Salvini — they had no fears except how cold it might become, already minus forty as it was growing dark.

  But here, too, they had two outstanding allies: their physical condition — the ability to go beyond fifty miles a day with their much-lightened packs — and, just as important, the small Nu-wick 120-hour candle in their kit. Weighing fourteen ounces, looking like a can of tuna, the light/heat candle came with six small and, according to Aussie, obscene-looking movable candles: one candle for light, two for cooking and, as two troopers slept under their Norway flap tents, two on guard, three candles for heat.

  * * *

  The deaths of Lawson and the others on the mission weighed heavily on David during the next seventy-two hours, more so as there was no opportunity to talk — each man refraining from speaking unless it was absolutely necessary. They were conserving energy, all communication done by hand signal, tire four of them moving in a diamond firefight pattern, just far enough from one another to have arcs of interlocking fire should it be required. David had to force himself, especially when he was on the point, to stop thinking about the choppers they’d had to abandon; it irked him that even some of their equipment would fall into enemy hands.

  As they got closer to the north end of the lake, his mood began to improve, however, with the expectation of meeting up with Freeman’s advance forces. The mood was shattered when they heard, though they couldn’t see, another salvo of four cruise missiles passing overhead toward Second Army. David’s anxiety increased, too, for his brother’s safety; but then on their satellite bounce shortwave radio they picked up a static-riven BBC overseas service broadcast announcing “reduced enemy cruise activity” and a substantial victory for Second Army east of Yerofey Pavlovich, which meant Freeman was on the march. Though it was a cause for celebration, they still couldn’t make any noise, and indeed the news only alerted them to another danger, namely that in their SPETS uniform any advance American patrols probing southwestward to Baikal would shoot first and ask questions later. They ripped off the SPETS shoulder insignia, but even so the Siberian white coveralls had a baggy form with a distinctive belt, unlike the Americans’ white overlays.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Robert finally had to sleep. But it wasn’t for long, and waking from his turn on the “plank,” one of the GST’s fold-down bunks, he felt sick from the suffocating smell of diesel. He was in a hellish red light, Johnson informing him triumphantly that he’d found the “rigged for red” switch while he, Brentwood, was asleep. In the event that they might have to go topside, through thin ice into the pitch-black Arctic night, the ruby glow would be easier on their eyes, allowing them to adjust to the darkness. “Do we still have them—” Brentwood almost passed out with the pain, a persistent hammer blow radiating from his shoulder through his neck and head muscles down into his lower back and buttocks. “Do we still have them in the northern quadrant? “

  “Yes, sir,” answered Johnson. “One of ‘em moved a few hundred yards or so but not far. They’ve come up close to the surface — just fired off another salvo. Means they’re still pretty close to the ice hole — only about a hundred feet below. Guess they’re going to pop off another few. I figure they must be near some upwelling — thin crust — so why move? Probably don’t even have to use any ‘charge-pick’ through the thinner ice now they’ve fired.”

  Robert Brentwood didn’t respond, for as he sat up he felt his head was literally going to fall off, consciousness having torn him brutally from a dream. He’d been with Rosemary and his little boy — would it be a boy or would it be a girl? — in a sylvan glade in Oxshott, the embracing, cool calm of a huge oak tree above them as they’d picnicked — chicken — with one of those wicker baskets so beloved by the English with everything in its right place, and his child smiling at him, eyes wide with wonder, and then David and Lana were there with her pilot boyfriend, the one she wanted to have as a fiancé if La Roche ever condescended to agree to a divorce, and the pilot’s head, which had somehow become Robert, was bandaged, sore, eyes covered as Lana had described in a letter.

  “We’re going to fire our missiles,” he told Johnson and Lopez, easing himself off the bunk. “Convince ‘em we’re still one of them.” He paused then pointed at the ONC E-8 chart, the position of the two subs, from which they hadn’t moved, marked with red crosses. “They’ll think we’re hitting Second Army.” He tried to smile at his own brilliance, but even the effort emitted a fiery pain deep inside his skull.

  “All right!” said Johnson, his enthusiasm echoing throughout the tiny sub, pummeling Brentwood’s head some more. Such enthusiasm was something that Robert Brentwood himself hadn’t been ab
le to regain, however much he wished, after the shock of the knife wound. At forty-three he was still a relatively young man, but he was growing old for submarines.

  “Way to go, Skipper!” echoed Lopez.

  “You okay?” Brentwood asked, squinting in the redded-out light. “You look like hell.”

  “A bit whacked, sir.”

  “After we shoot off the missiles, you hit that bunk.”

  “Sir, I’ll be all-”

  “Do as I say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  To Lopez’s utter amazement Robert Brentwood chewed two aspirin without water as he punched in the coordinate vectors for the attack arcs, double-checking the distances and remembering the forty-mile-an-hour winds expected in the blizzard they’d seen racing south down the lake as they’d egressed Port Baikal. In any event Brentwood knew that with the two enemy subs’ exact “quadrant 85” position known and the two subs being close to the surface, a direct hit wouldn’t be necessary. A half mile either way, even across the 85 line into nearby 65 or 56 quadrants, would do the job. “I’d say that after that last salvo at Second Army they’re either into quadrant six five or just moving into five six. Here, southeast of—” He couldn’t pronounce it and spelled it, “S-B-E-G-A. Kow’d you say that, Johnson?”

  “Asshole country, sir.”

  Then Lopez had a suggestion. “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, could we pop one on Irkutsk?”

  “Pop one?” In the fatigue that gives rise to silly laughter, even in the most introverted souls, during moments of high tension, Johnson and Robert Brentwood, a world apart in rank, broke up in common cause, Brentwood shaking his head, Johnson, tears in his eyes, looking across at Lopez. “Pop one! You dork!”

  “Well, I’m telling you, Lopez,” said Robert Brentwood, right hand holding his head as if it were a basket of eggs, “I’m not gunning for civilians — nor is Freeman — but I like your idea. Matter of fact, I like it so much, if we get out of this I’m gonna see you get promoted.”

  “Hell no, sir.”

  “Only let’s spread the good news around a little, Lopez,” said Brentwood. “On behalf of Second Army and—” A stab of needlelike pain forced Brentwood to sit down abruptly on the bunk.

  “You okay, sir?” asked Johnson anxiously.

  “No. Son of a—” The pain passed but left him nauseated and dizzy for a few minutes. Johnson was trying not to look worried, but he was scared. As a Sea Wolf captain Brentwood had all the Soviet firing procedures down pat. Without him, Johnson doubted he could handle it—knew he couldn’t handle it.

  Brentwood had Lopez strap his left arm against his chest, moved to the computer, triple-checked the coordinates, then stopped. Without looking around he announced, “Lopez, I’m gonna promote you whether you damn well like it or not.” He looked around at Lopez, on steerage, then forward a few feet to Johnson. “We are going to spread it around, boys. Johnson, how many cruise missiles on that raft?

  “Eight, sir.”

  “Right! With the four we already have that makes twelve. We’ll clobber the Stalingrad Division from behind with six. Won’t know what the hell hit them. Confusion’ll be worth as much to us as the casualties we inflict. And, gentlemen, let’s not be mean about this. We’ll split the other six with two for the KMK factory at Novokuznetsk, which we’ll fire first, and two we’ll donate to Akademgorodok, near Novosibirsk. The KMK factory,” he explained to Lopez, who hadn’t picked up on the name, “is where they make their tanks as well as these GSTs. And that leaves two for our two friends up north. Seeing they stole our technology, let’s demonstrate its accuracy, gentlemen. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Okay. Let’s have a sonar ping,” ordered Brentwood, and the easy tone of a second ago was now replaced by his professional demeanor. “Come on, hurry it up.”

  “Yes, sir.” Now they were on active sonar, Brentwood explaining, “Might as well be brazen about it. What’s that old man Freeman always says? L’audace, I’audace, toujours I’audace!”

  “He stole it from Patton,” said Johnson.

  “Who stole it from Frederick the Great,” said Brentwood. “Well, it’s ours now.”

  The active’s “pings” were now bouncing, or “bonging,” back, telling them that they had a relatively thin ice roof no more than half a mile three degrees starboard.

  “No problem, sir,” Johnson pronounced. “Looks as thin as a virgin’s—”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” said Robert Brentwood, notoriously prudish about such matters, even in front of his sister Lana who, is a nurse had seen it all and had “done time,” as young David put it, with “Scumbag” La Roche.

  Reaching the area of the thin ice, Brentwood ordered Johnson to take the sub to a depth of two thousand feet, approaching the sub’s crush depth, and at an off angle to the targeted ice patch. He then pulled the lever to release float charge. Two minutes later there was a gut-wrenching thud, and Brentwood immediately ordered the GST to fifty feet.

  “Fifty feet, aye, sir,” came Johnson’s confirmation. At fifty feet he levelled the sub out, still surprised at how quickly the tiny GST, a seal compared to a whale in size, responded. The problem was not to let it get ahead of you and slam into the ice.

  “Half speed,” Brentwood instructed Lopez, then to Johnson, “Twenty-five feet.”

  “Twenty-five feet, sir… Levelling at twenty-five.”

  “Very well. Man battle stations missile. Set condition one!”

  “Condition one, aye, sir,” responded Johnson.

  “Departments ready?” asked Brentwood. There were only two departments, Lopez’s and Johnson’s, but Brentwood knew that this was a time for tried and true procedures to steady their nerves.

  “Steerage ready, sir,” reported Lopez, followed by Johnson’s, “Sonar ready.”

  “Very well,” acknowledged Brentwood. “Neutral trim.”

  Johnson made a slight adjustment to starboard.”Neutral trim, sir.”

  “Stand by to flood tubes one and two,” ordered Brentwood, it being standard procedure on any missile submarine to be ready to fire torpedoes in defense of the ship should an enemy vessel try to interfere with the missile launch. “Completing spin up,” Brentwood advised them as he entered the final salinity and current corrections that would affect the missiles’ trajectories. “Spin up complete. Prepare for ripple fire.”

  “Prepare for ripple fire,” responded Johnson.

  “Fire one,” ordered Brentwood.

  “Fire one. One fired.” There was a hiss of compressed air and a rasping noise, the sub rolling ten degrees port before regaining neutral trim.

  “Fire two.”

  “Fire two. Two fired.”

  In less than three and half minutes all four cruise missiles had passed through their nose cones’ protective membranes, exited the ice-free hole, booster rockets engaged, and were en route to their targets. Lopez and Johnson exited the sub for the reloads, while Brentwood made copious notes on the GST’s performance as he prepared a course to take the sub toward thinner ice at the eastern shore after all salvos had been fired.

  * * *

  “In the spring, General,” said Professor Leonid Grigorenko, looking out on the frozen Ob Sea that was Akademgorodok’s private lake, “I hope you’ll find time to come out sailing with me and lrena.”

  The gruff, heavy-browed Yesov shook his head. “Nyet, thank you all the same, Professor. I am no sailor. Besides, there will still be ice in the spring.”

  “Oh, come now, Comrade. It adds to the adventure, yes?”

  “Nyet.” Yesov looked about so that none of his aides at the professor’s cocktail party, to celebrate the success of the GST offensive, heard that he was leery of anything to do with water-including bathing, some had said. “I get sick in the Jacuzzi, Professor.”

  “Ah, Marshal!” said Chernko, his familiarity claiming Yesov, marshal of all Siberian forces, as if he were a long-lost friend. “How goes the Thirty-fir
st?”

  “Well,” said Yesov curtly — he didn’t like Chernko, even if he was hailed in Novosibirsk for his GST plan. Yesov was willing to accept the general’s help, but to Yesov it had been too conditional altogether — Chernko telling them, insisting on what pleasures and luxuries, including dachas, he would get in return. Yesov despised him. Here was the Russian, a former KGB chief, now sucking up to the Western alliance in Moscow while slipping Novosibirsk vital information via his spies, information chat Yesov had to grudgingly admit had served them well in stopping the Allies at the Urals, pummeling the Allies in fact. Still, he disliked the man’s opportunism. As far as he was concerned Chernko was little more than the old bourgeois “Communist”—as ideologically unsound and, at root, as uncommitted to the military as Gorbachev had been.

  “I’m well satisfied,” said Chernko. “If the Thirty-first does as well in the east against this Freeman as we have in the west, eh. it’ll be over soon. A cease-fire, and then we go for American aid. The Americans are suckers. Once the Thirty-first mauls Freeman’s soft Second Ar—”

  The apartment building shook, everyone thinking it was an earthquake, broken glass, whole windows popping out and whizzing through the air, expensive dresses of the elite slashed, many of the generals’ wives screaming from the minor cuts and abrasions created by the first shock wave. Yesov had moved under the mahogany dining table with all the finesse of a charging T-80, sending two colonels’ wives splaying on the plush Persian carpet. As people were getting up off the floor, his beeper was set off by the pressure of his folding gut.

  “Machina!”—”Stop that thing!” one of the women screamed hysterically.

  “Tishe!”— “Be quiet!” Yesov replied, red-faced, lumbering up with the help of an aide, whom he quickly shook off like an offending mullet. The marshal was in the throes of regaining his ruffled dignity. It was seven minutes, the phone lines being down, before he heard that the KMK works in Novokuznetsk had been badly hit, as well as the Institute of Defense Science in Akademgorodok.