by Ian Slater
But young Stimson knew little or none of this, and had seen only the wild, slightly ridiculous side of a man whom death had stalked from Ratmanov Island to Baikal. And not all, he knew, were like Lewis. David Brentwood, about Stimson’s own age, they said, was quiet, reserved, more like the SAS Welshman they called Choir Williams, and like Salvini, the American Delta commando, both of whom were now also on their way to Freeman’s HQ.
* * *
Near Kultuk, Thomis, hunched in his foxhole, was complaining again, brushing fresh snow off his white overlay. “Let’s get out of these friggin’ foxholes while we still got the breath.”
“Where you gonna go, Thomis?” asked Valdez, fingering the safety on the SAW. “Frappin’ great cliff behind you, man.”
“Yeah, well, let’s pull back into those railway tunnels. Least we’d get some cover.”
“Oh yeah?” posited Emory, who hailed from Georgia. “Those tunnels, man, they’re just big coffins waiting for you.”
“Hey listen, Georgia — I’d rather have a ton o’ fucking concrete over my head than this friggin’ snow hole. This ain’t gonna stop shit!”
The sergeant let them bitch. It wasn’t as if they’d give away their position to the Siberians, who must know it already. Besides, he’d sent patrols out.
Emory thought he heard a creaking noise — but he’d been hearing creaking noises, “like tanks,” all night despite the fact that Charlie Company’s forward patrols and those from the combat support company strung out farther north along the rail line had reported no enemy in sight.
“Holy Toledo!” said Valdez. “Will you look at that!” No one had to — the red tails of the Siberian MLRs north of them streaking out from Minsky’s southernmost flank were arcing out of the fog higher above the lake, their fiery parabolas, seen only briefly above the fog before they disappeared, followed by more speckling in the blizzard, like explosions of firecrackers beneath some vast sheet, where Thomis knew Americans were dying.
Only three seconds later, which told Charlie Company the MLRs were hitting about forty miles away, would they hear the sound of the MLR explosions amid the steady rumble of the big self-propelled Siberian 203mms and the sounds, like wood splitting, of more fracture zones opening up in the lake’s ice cover, trapping so many Americans in the retreat.
“The Siberians were in the rail tunnels,” said Valdez, “near Port Baikal, where they had those midget subs on the rail tracks, ready to slide ‘em into the lake. Tunnels didn’t help them none when that SAS/Delta team hit ‘em.”
“So?” charged Thomis.
“So they got roasted, man. Southern-fried. That Brentwood guy and his outfit popped an AT round in that tunnel, and boom! Scratch one midget.”
“Lucky shot!” said Thomis unconvincingly.
“I thought there were two Brentwood guys in that attack,” said Emory. “One SAS, the other in the navy or—”
“Two Brentwoods? Three?” said Thomis, spitting into the snow. “What’s the difference, man?”
“I heard there was three of ‘em — in the family, I mean.”
“So the three of them are fucking nuts!” growled Thomis, stamping his feet, the snow having melted beneath his boots, so that he had to bunch up snow in front of his foxhole to make his shoulder position against the M-16 more comfortable. “I’d still rather be in one of those tunnels — get some concrete covering my ass — than stuck out here like a fucking tree.”
“Tunnels are fucking death traps,” said Valdez. “Concussion’d pop your eyeballs.”
“So you been told.” Thomis looked away, knowing he’d been caught out on a fundamental point. He knew Valdez was technically right about concussion in a shelter, but knowing Valdez was right didn’t matter. Psychologically, being stuck in a foxhole was a hell of a lot worse, as far as Thomis was concerned. “Huh! Way I heard it, it was a lucky shot that S/D team got in that tunnel. That mad fuckin’ Aussie that fired it—”
“Jesus, man, who gives a shit who fired it?”
“Well, that Aussie said it was a lucky shot. Said so in the Stars and Stripes.”
“So now you believe the fuckin’ papers?” countered Valdez. “I’m tellin’ you once and for all — tunnels are bad news. Besides, if you want to go hide, man—”
“Hey, hey, Davy Crockett,” countered Thomis, “don’t give me your hero shit. You want to hide your ass just as much as I do.” Thomis looked around. “Like everybody does. Ain’t that right?” He looked at Emory on his left for support, but Emory wasn’t going to get involved, so Thomis shot an angry glance back at Valdez over his right shoulder. “Point I’m makin’, Juan, is that SAS/Delta team were the A-one cream of the crop. The best — and they knew just what they were looking for. The tunnel they blasted was no accident — it was their mission to get the sub pen, man. Sibirs’ll just come at us willy-nilly. We’re in a tunnel, we stand a better chance.”
“Man,” cut in the corporal from New York, “wish to fuck that S/D team was here now.”
“Yeah,” said Thomis. “Well, they ain’t. Probably sunnin’ ‘emselves in Khabarovsk. They say it’s gettin’ nice and warm there.”
“Yeah,” said Valdez. “Minus ten instead of minus thirty. Great.”
“Yeah. Well, put it this way — I’d rather be there than here.”
“So what’s new?”
“Relax,” said the sergeant. “It’s gonna warm up here pretty soon.”
A machine gunner at the end of a three-man trench made grunting noises. “Very funny, Sarge. ‘Gonna warm up’!”
“Yeah,” said Thomis. “Regular fuckin’ riot. Heeeere’s Jay Leno! Still say we’d be better off in a fuckin’ tunnel.”
“We’d be better off if those SAS/Delta commandos were here,” said the machine gunner.
“Dreamer!” said Thomis. “They’re probably pissed in Khabarovsk and deep in poontang!”
“Shit!” It was their platoon sergeant putting down the field phone in disgust. “Our land line to HQ is cut.”
“So we use the radio,” said Valdez.
“Yeah, so they can jam it,” said Thomis. “Nice goin’, Valdez.”
“Knock if off,” said the sergeant.
“Maybe it was an accident,” said Emory. “Tree fallin’ or somethin’.”
“Right!” said Thomis. “A tree — knocked over by a fucking T-80. You’re as stupid as Valdez.”
“Thomis!” warned the sergeant. “Knock it off!”
Thomis was shaking his head, his breath like puffs of smoke in the night air. “A tree falling — Jesus!”
He was terrified.
* * *
Aussie’s immediate inquiry on seeing David Brentwood was to ask him about his honeymoon. “Has it fallen off yet?”
David ignored the Australian’s vulgarity. The four of them — David, Aussie, Choir Williams, and Salvini — liked one another well enough when they’d been in action, but away from the fighting for a while, each had, albeit briefly, entered a world in which war was no longer the norm, and where fear of death was talked about, so that now their civilian-heightened sensibilities inhibited a camaraderie that for most of them only exhibited itself under fire.
“You look chipper!” Aussie informed David as they shook hands. “Been doin’ the old in-out, have you? She teach you a few tricks?”
“How you been doing, Aussie?” asked David.
“Lousy. Since the cease-fire went down the tube, there’s been no more beer.”
“Oh, the poor fellow!” chimed in Choir Williams, winking at Salvini. “Deprived, are we, Lewis?”
“Nuts!” put in Salvini. “I saw cases of our stuff, piled up in Vladivostok.”
“Japanese beer,” said Aussie. “Horse piss. Nah, I mean the old Tsingtao. Chinese stuff. Beautiful big bottles, too. Drink that stuff all day and no hangover. Nothing.”
“Oh yeah?” asked Salvini skeptically. “What’s so special about it?”
“Don’t ask,” warned Brentwood, smiling across at Choir
.
“Okay,” said Aussie. “So you’ve heard it before, smartass. But Salvini’s ignorant. He’s from Brooklyn, and its my duty to educate the poor sod.”
“When the Germans had the beer concession in China,” began Choir, imitating Aussie as best he could.
“Quiet, you Welsh bastard!” cut in Aussie, Stimson telling them that Freeman and his aide, Colonel Norton, were coming across the quad from the HQ communications nut. Aussie took no notice. “The Krauts bottled their beer under the old German Purity Law of 1516. No preservatives allowed. Now, when old Mao Cow Dung beat Cash My Check in ‘forty-nine and booted out all the foreign devils, they still kept the Kraut beer factory in Tsingtao.”
“If you say so, professor,” jibed Choir.
“I do say so and—”
“Atten-hun!” called Stimson. The SAS/Delta team snapped to it, but despite Freeman’s entrance, Stimson sensed an air of equality about the men. There was no disrespect toward the general — he was, even if under attack from the media, especially the La Roche newspaper empire, already a renowned figure to the men he commanded — the new American army’s Patton. Besides, the more media scumbags attacked him, the more his men would defend him — at least those not under fire around Lake Baikal. There, his general strategy was neither divined nor, if understood, countenanced. Freeman’s headquarters’ bulletins quoting “tactical necessity” affording little comfort to those like Private Thomis in Charlie Company who knew that the possibility of being overrun was growing by the hour.
But here in the briefing hut, at least, Freeman’s reputation was secure — so far, his knowledge of the minutiae of battle legendary, as was his fury against many Pentagon directives, such as the one that had distributed “Technicolor” condoms to the white-camouflaged troops in the Siberian midwinter.
“At ease, gentlemen,” said Freeman, taking off his heavy winter coat, the outline of the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer barely visible beneath his tunic. “No time to waste. I’ve called you here because we’re getting the ass kicked out of us on that lake and I have to find some way of taking the pressure off those boys. At the same time, I’ve got to stop this breakthrough down south around Manzhouli in Chinese Mongolia. With those ChiCom divisions swinging west, Yesov’s moving east. They’ll close the box on our boys — what’s left of them — around Baikal and split our entire east-west Khabarovsk/Baikal supply line in two. As if that isn’t enough, my G-2 tells me northern Siberian divisions are moving south toward the lake from up north around Yakutsk to get us in a three-way squeeze. Now the Pentagon has ‘suggested’ I withdraw all forces to Khabarovsk — buy time to consolidate for a summer counterattack. Colonel Norton here concurs.”
There was a long silence, Stimson struck by the fact that none of the four SAS/Delta veterans made the slightest attempt to venture an opinion, though he sensed that none of them was afraid to speak up. It was as if they were telling Freeman, “It’s your decision. That’s why you get a general’s pay.”
Stimson was wrong. The truth was that all of them, including Norton, already knew what he was going to say. Their silence was their consent. They were with him. Now it was now merely a matter of details.
“Where you going to hit them, General?” asked David Brentwood.
Jesus! thought Stimson. He’s being clobbered left, right, and center, and he’s talking about going on the attack?
“Nizhneangarsk,” Freeman said, then turned abruptly to the map, knuckle rapping the northern end of the four-hundred-mile lake. “The railhead on the BAM — Baikal to Amur mainline. We cut that — we cut the bulk of their supplies for their army of the north and for Yesov’s left hook farther south across the lake. That is part one of three, gentlemen. Any one of the three fails and we are in the manure up to our neck.” Freeman saw the frown on young Stimson’s face. “You ill, Lieutenant?”
“Ah, no, sir. I’m fine.”
“You look ill. Come on, spit it out, son.”
“Well, sir, ah…. “ Stimson was glancing nervously at the map, estimating that Nizhneangarsk was at least fourteen hundred miles northwest of Khabarovsk, and wondering why in heck no one else had seen the problem. “Sir,” he began, “I know flying conditions aren’t much good right now.”
“Aren’t much good?” said Norton. “They’re appalling.”
“Yes,” agreed Stimson, “but I was wondering, sir— well, why don’t we just bomb the railway? Wouldn’t that be much—” He stopped.
None of the others exchanged knowing glances or in any way tried to make him feel embarrassed. The lieutenant was young, and all young men, even the brightest from West Point, had to learn. Freeman took out his George C. Scott reading glasses and opened a red-diagonal-striped green file, showing the lieutenant the ARPs — area reconnaissance photos — taken by F-4G Phantoms and a few Stealth F-117As, the latter having gone in bravely despite the low impulse radar that had undone the defensive blocking action of their radar-resilient angular technology. Two of the Stealths and Phantoms had paid for it, though, and had gone down in the enfilade of heavy radar-guided AA fire.
“Son,” began Freeman, “let me tell you something the public don’t know, something our fliers learned in Vietnam, had to relearn in Iraq, and what their granddaddies knew when they were fighting the Luftwaffe. At any time — I stress at any time — rail lines, especially railway bridges, where the enemy can sink pontoons right next to the busted-up bridge a couple of inches under the water to fool reconnaissance and run the box cars across at night, are notoriously difficult to knock out.”
“But with Smart bombs—” began Stimson.
Freeman nodded impatiently, tapping the stills taken from the black-and-white video shots through the thicket of AA fire around the Nizhneangarsk rail head. “Problem is, son — and here we’re ignoring the flak and the fact they’ve got ‘smart’ AA defenses up there — problem is the damn snow.” He showed the lieutenant the pertinent reconnaissance photos — the rail lines and black ties scattered about like broken sticks in the snow. The next photo, time-marked twenty-four hours later, showed the same photo view, the rails back together in working order, the next photo showing the rails scattered again. In the fourth and last photo the rails and ties were all in place once more.
“Same area,” Freeman assured him. “The thing is, Lieutenant, ground sensors we air dropped outside the immediate area of the station registered movement at the rail head within an hour of our Stealths’ air attack. Heavy movement.”
“Tanks moving up?” proffered Stimson.
Freeman slipped his glasses off. “No. Our analysts are sure of that — it’d be a different overpressure, weight of the vehicles, if it had been tanks. No, it was rolling stock, all right, moving through the area we’d just plastered — half an hour after we’d bombed it and lost four aircraft into the bargain. Those broken tracks and ties you see are fake. Extruded plastic, we thought. Point is, they were just shiftin’ them around, son. Meanwhile the snow kept covering the real line two, three hundred yards away. Our bombs were just blowing up snow. So we sent in Smart bombs — to lock in on the real, snow-covered lines. Then we found we’d been wrong. They weren’t plastic lines they were using to fool our recon cameras, they were genuine rail lines, spares just moved around after each attack to make it look as if we’d hit the main line. No, son, it’s the same old story. Had to do it with Charlie in ‘Nam — had to do it with that son of a bitch Insane in Iraq. You have to go in on the ground. We’ll use the Airborne. It’s the only way.”
“Where do we fit in, General?” asked Aussie Lewis.
Freeman gave the four SAS/D men an enigmatic smile. “Well, I thought after that sub base you knocked out, you boys’d be bored up there. Had enough of that lake, haven’t you?”
Before they could answer, Freeman moved closer to the map and, using his glasses as a pointer, tapped the northern sector — not of the lake, but of the southwest corner of the Amur hump, on the Siberian-Chinese border. “We’re in this war, gentlemen, bec
ause the Chinese said we broke the cease-fire. Right here.” He was tapping A-7. “Well, whether we did or not, we’ve got to get our boys out of there. We’ve tried sending in choppers — they’ve been blown to bits.” He turned to David Brentwood. “What we need is a small, well-equipped commando force, flying in NOE to go in, secure a chopper LZ on the top of that damn mountain before the ChiComs overrun it. Now, our boys weren’t supposed to be in that area anyway — at least not that close to the border — and we’ve had no communication from them. But we can sort out blame later. Most of all, I want to get as many of them out as I can. You game for it. Lewis?”
NOE, nap of the earth — flying in which the choppers were often no more than twenty feet above the treeline, following the land’s contours by radar alone — didn’t particularly worry Lewis, but Choir Williams, he knew, hated it. “Well, General — Choir’s your boy for NOE. Gives him a high, it does.”
“Good,” said Freeman, grabbing his coat. “I’ll leave you with Norton to figure out the details.” He paused. “As fast as you can, boys. Meanwhile, I promise you I’m gonna hit those bastards of Yesov’s up at Nizhneangarsk. If I can stop the son of a bitch’s offensive from getting east of the lake, then I can wheel what’s left of Three Corps south to reinforce our boys ranged against the ChiComs. Bring Cheng to a standstill. And if your brother does his bit, Brentwood, we might just be able to launch a counterattack. Defeat into victory, eh?” With that, a question still on David Brentwood’s lips, Freeman was gone.
“Over here, gentlemen,” Norton informed them. “We’ve already got the choppers’ fuel and sundries allocated for you. Now — weapons.” He looked at David Brentwood, who everyone instinctively knew would lead the raid on the mountain.
