by Ian Slater
“What did the Jew woman tell you?” asked the PSB interrogator.
Ling was silent, his gaze downcast, fixed on a spot of rat droppings to better focus his resistance.
“The white woman you had hiding in your house,” said the interrogator. “What did she tell you?”
Ling shook his head.
“She told you nothing?” proffered the interrogator. Ling’s head moved, but it seemed more a stiffening of his own will than an answer. Personally, the interrogator had told his superior, he’d much rather talk to the comrade — to convince Ling in a calm, logical manner that helping the Siberian Jewess against his own people was treason, an act not only against the party, but against the people. And the party loved the people. The Siberian at the consulate, however — Latov — was in a hurry to break the underground movement in Harbin, the major distribution center of food and munitions not only for Cheng’s armies fighting the Americans around Manzhouli, but for Chinese divisions spread along the Manchurian-Siberian border.
Ling didn’t feel the electric shock he’d braced himself for. Instead, the interrogator suddenly leapt out of his wooden chair with a bull-like roar, the current having short-circuited along the table. “You idiot!” he shouted, slapping one of the guards so hard that the man’s cap went flying. The other guard fumbled with the wires again while the interrogator strode angrily up and down the side of the cell farthest from the table. The shock had jolted his nerves so badly he had lit another cigarette while one was already on the go. He told the guard to turn up the amperage, and when the shock hit Ling, his scream could be heard in Stalin Park. Ling blacked out and had almost choked, the idiot guard having forgotten the tongue clamp and having turned the amperage too high.
The interrogator, his nerves rattled for the second time, reminded the guards that if they didn’t get results quickly, then someone would be taking their rice bowl to the front, and they would be thrown into the battle for A-7. American gangsters had already inflicted seventeen percent casualties on the PLA, and though they would be undoubtedly overrun, they were putting up a fierce resistance.
“Disconnect the wires,” ordered the interrogator. “You fools will kill him before he can talk.” He turned on the man at the door. “Well, just don’t stand there — go and get the boy from the hutong.” It was a thing the interrogator didn’t like to do, but now his job was much more than an internal matter of running a Democracy Movement cell to ground; it was war between the American imperialists and the People’s Army. Whatever was necessary had to be done.
While they were waiting for the boy, Ling’s wife was dragged screaming from her cell farther down the corridor. The interrogator put a cigarette into Ling’s mouth. Ling spat it out, but it was as if the interrogator didn’t see it. “I don’t dislike you, comrade,” he told Ling, his tone affecting sincerity. “I admire your courage.” Ling tried to spit at him, but it had no direction or force, merely dribbling down the faint stubble of his sallow chin.
“Now!” said the interrogator, throwing down the cigarette he’d barely started, grinding it into the time-polished floor and shaking his finger like a schoolmaster. “You have made me very angry.” A half-running, half-shuffling noise came closer to the cell, and in the dirty saffron light of the corridor Ling saw his wife, crumpled between the sweating arms of her captors.
“Put her in the next cell!” the interrogator commanded. Mrs. Ling had not looked at her husband, fearing it would weaken both their resolve, and both knowing he was a dead man.
“We’ll let them think about it for a while,” announced the interrogator, now lighting another cigarette. “Let’s see the Siberian whore.” The two guards followed him eagerly from Ling’s cell. Not only did they want to see her tortured, but if someone didn’t talk soon, they’d be in Manzhouli.
* * *
The helicopter now was high above Charlie Company in the darkness, but whether it was in front or behind them, or coming down directly overhead, was difficult to tell, the heat wash of its rotor column and engines presenting no more than a white blurred image in Thomis’s night vision goggles, icy gusts of snow stinging their faces like sand.
The next instant, the treeline a hundred yards in front of them was vibrant in light, the fuel air explosive detonated overhead, then came the sounds of men screaming, on fire, scrambling frantically from their foxholes, rolling desperately in the snow; other men leaving their positions, running to help, only to be machine-gunned as the Siberian Mi-28 Havoc, its silhouette often mistaken for the American Apache, pulled out of its 150-mile-per-hour dive. The Havoc turned in a deadly pirouette, its slaved fifty-millimeter still firing, the gun’s flame suppressor hiding its position except from those directly in its thermal-image range finder, and they were now dead or wounded. The Havoc’s stream of.50s was hitting them at point-blank range, bodies disintegrating as the depleted uranium armor-piercing, explosive-head bullets tore into the men of Charlie Company, including the two-man AA team forty feet from Thomis, their charred bodies still burning, flung back from their air-to-air Stinger, the shadow of its barrel flickering on the snow in response to the crackling, spitting fire now raging in the curtain of flame that was the forest’s edge. Tall birch burned like oil-soaked torches, and beech trees exploded from the superheated gases. As the burned barbecue smell filled Thomis’s nostrils, he was crying, the Havoc now only faintly visible before it disappeared into the blackness above the forest.
“Stay where you are!” the sergeant was yelling. “Emory, get the fuck back! Stay back!”
Emory was throwing his groundsheet over someone, stomping its edges to smother the fire, but the groundsheet billowed and rose in a soft burst of flame, Valdez seeming to have melted, what was left of his skin dripping like hot wax slipping away from his face, his eyes cooked white, glaring into the burning night. Some of the fuel air gel had splashed onto Emory, and he was slapping it, trying to get rid of it as he stumbled back to his foxhole. The supreme irony was that a radio signal had just come in from Freeman’s HQ informing Major Truet that an evac of C Company — wounded having first priority — would be attempted within the next hour.
Ammunition on the American dead bodies was still cooking off — exploding from the heat — and the sergeant was shouting at everyone to keep their heads down, that an evac would soon be on its way. Thomis, upending his M-16, resting the barrel on his right foot, pulled the trigger, the sound of the shot lost in the general melee; his foxhole, like so many others, was filled with the reek of cordite and urine.
“Look to your front!” the sergeant was yelling, his voice on the edge of hysteria.
“Medic!” shouted Thomis.
The medic heard him, but there were so many others who had also been hit, it would be another ten minutes before he could reach Thomis. “Use your field dressing,” he shouted, and Thomis, hands trembling, felt for his field dressing pack beneath his helmet band.
* * *
Inside his 1V13 heavy-armored artillery command vehicle, General Minsky moved from the folding seat immediately beneath the turret — the dull, thick vibration from the 8/600 generator pulsing through his body as he folded the traverse table — easing himself forward to use the PW-1 periscope sight through which, by determining polar coordinates, he could double-check the firing position of the 203mm battery and train the battery’s master gun. But the blizzard was still in progress, and he moved back to the traverse table, having to rely on previously computed positions as he readied for the next phase of the shock attack, a two-inch broken red line indicating the positions of the isolated American company as reported by the Havoc.
Minsky missed the open vent days of the Afghan War. Here it was so cold you had no option but to have everyone shut up, relying on the NBC — nuclear, biological, chemical — air filter for fresh air. Even so, diesel fumes still got through, and at times made him feel nauseated. Still, the battle as recorded on the command vehicle’s data terminal was going well, the Slutsk division living up to its repu
tation. Its radio operator — aboard this, Minsky’s state-of-the-art command vehicle — was picking up some of the frantic radio traffic from the Americans just hit by the Havoc.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“By God,” said Freeman on being told that III Corps was effectively off the board, “they’ll pay for this, Dick! I’ll teach those sluts and Yesov’s other Mongol hordes that butchering Americans comes at a high cost. Two for one.”
Norton thought it unwise at that moment to point out that the Siberian divisions were not exactly Mongols. But the Pentagon, knowing of Freeman’s affection for the “Good Book,” had succinctly cautioned the general against too hasty a reaction by somewhat sanctimoniously reminding him that “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
“And I,” Freeman had replied, “am his sword!” Gathering the last of his gear for phase one of his three-phase counterattack, the general was looking at the 241 section of the ONC E-7 chart showing the southern end of Lake Baikal, where the remnants of III Corps were being devoured by Yesov’s armor. “Even the goddamn weather’s against us.”
“Should lift in about forty-eight hours, General,” Norton tried to reassure him. “It’s getting colder up north ‘round Yakutsk, but the met boys predict quite a jump in temperatures round the Siberian-Mongolian border.”
“Well,” said Freeman, shaking his head at the enormity of what was happening on the lake, over five thousand casualties already reported, Medevac and MUST — Medical Unit Self-Contained — units overextended. “Jump in temperature might clear the weather, but it’ll be too damn late, Dick. Only jump that’ll count will be the Airborne’s over Nizhneangarsk — and that won’t be any good unless the SEAL team does what it’s supposed to. Each part of the plan depends on the other.”
“I know that, sir.”
“Now listen — if we insert that SEAL team and have trouble extracting, I don’t want them written off. Left on their lonesome. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If they say they’re in trouble, you get an SAS/Delta team in there with everything they’ve got to provide cover.” Freeman held up his hand to stay Norton’s objections. “Yes, yes, I know, it might put any rescue team in the hole, but it’s a matter of policy — Americans have to do everything to get our boys out if they get in a jam. Hell, that’s what we’re all about.”
“We could move a team in now,” suggested Norton.
“I don’t want to increase the traffic unless absolutely necessary. If anyone gets spotted prematurely, the SEALs’ whole operation’d be shot. Besides, closest S/D team we’ve got is the one going in on A-7 to help out that goddamn battery that started this whole thing. You’re right — they’d be the closest to the SEAL objective, but we can only use them after they secure a perimeter for a chopper withdrawal of the battery, if they manage that.”
“That’d be one for the books,” commented Norton. “Younger brother rescuing the older hand.”
Freeman looked blankly at Norton, the general’s mind having been so preoccupied with the minutiae of preparation for what would be his and history’s biggest airborne invasion since Arnhem in ‘44, he had momentarily forgotten that two of the three Brentwoods would be in action at more or less the same time. The general paid it no mind. It was hardly unprecedented; brothers in Second Army were fighting a lot closer together than young David Brentwood would be at Manzhouli and Robert farther south. The general also paid it no mind because he knew that if Robert Brentwood’s SEAL team met heavy resistance, his entire three-pronged counterattack plan against the Siberian-ChiCom alliance would fail, and it was a thought he didn’t want to entertain. It was the first time Norton had seen Freeman willfully turning away from an unpleasant possibility, which was a measure not only of how badly the war was going for Second Army and how tired the general was, but above all, just how vital the SEAL mission would be along with Freeman’s impending jump over Nizhneangarsk.
Freeman turned his attention to the map of the naval supply line, stretching all the way from America’s west coast through the Kuril Island gaps, immediately north of Japan, through the Sea of Okhotsk to Siberia. It was another possible weak link, for if the Siberian Alfa Hunter/Killer subs could plug the narrow, shallow gaps between the Kurils — the gateway to the Sea of Okhotsk — then the enemy could quite literally turn off the oil supply to Freeman’s entire Second Army, the general reminding Norton of George Patton’s famous dictum: “My men can eat their boots, but my tanks gotta have gas!” Which for just one M1A1 meant two and a half gallons for every mile.
Even as Freeman spoke, the sonar operator aboard the Sea Wolf USS Reagan on war patrol just east of the Kuril Islands heard a faint pulse through the undersea “frying” of shrimps clicking and whales moaning, and alerted the executive officer, Hale, now captain in Robert Brentwood’s absence; Merrick, in turn, had moved up to be the XO. When Hale heard the sonar bong by his bunk, he got up so fast, he knocked over the picture of his wife and two children, and within a minute — still stuffing his shirt inside his trousers — was standing inside the brass rail that skirted the scope island in Reagan’s redded-out combat control center. He wanted coffee, but Robert Brentwood had strictly enforced his no-liquid, no-food rule in the CCC.
“What’ve we got, Sonar?” Hale asked raspily, looking at the three-tiered green screen.
“Unidentified submarine, sir. Suspected hostile by nature of sound.”
“Signature?”
“Negative.” It meant there wasn’t enough noise being emitted by the unidentified craft as yet to get a “prop-print” from the computer library, which could identify a specific vessel by matching its in-transit sound which, like the sound of every human being, had an individual “voice” print. But sometimes the enemy tried to add a baffle, a steel plate welded here or there, or extra acoustic, sound-absorbing tile on the superstructure to alter their noise signature. Even so, a good operator, like leading sonarman Rogers — whose higher-range hearing hadn’t been damaged by too much “hard rock” music when he was younger — could often identify the class of ship from a sound which, to someone else’s hearing, would have been the faintest pulsing of a prop.
“I’d say an Alfa,” said Rogers, adding, “Might have flaked,” indicating that the fast, forty-five-knot Hunter/Killer Alfa might have lost part of its anechoic paint, designed to absorb rather than reflect the ping of a searching sub’s “active” sonar. But Hale had the USS Reagan’s sonar on “passive”—listening mode only, the sub itself on silent running. While its nuclear reactor was unable to be shut down completely, it was heavily muffled, the reactor crew wearing their yellow booties, not only to prevent them from transferring any possible radioactive particles from the “coffeepot” or nuclear reactor throughout the sub, but to prevent even the sound of footsteps radiating through the hull.
“Sir — correction,” said Rogers. “Louder now. It’s a diesel — a quiet one, all right, but a diesel beat for sure. Ten thousand yards — closing!”
“Print out possible hostiles,” ordered Hale, also informing the crew quickly, calmly, “Mr. Merrick retains the deck. I have the con.” They were now well beyond the relatively shallow shelf of the Kuril Gap, into deeper water. Merrick, as XO in Brentwood’s absence, immediately took up his position as officer of the deck behind the two planesmen, noting one whose face was beaded in perspiration. Wordlessly, he pulled out a damp tissue from the flip-up box and, so as not to alarm the planesman or divert his attention, he simply said, “Wiping,” and drew the tissue across the man’s forehead. A millisecond lost because of stinging perspiration in the eyes could put them all dead in the path of a torpedo or SUBROC. Sonar’s auxiliary screen was now a column of brown X’s, signifying the different classes of diesel to the right of each, listing speed — surfaced and dived — displacement, missiles, radar arrays, sonars, and officer/crew complement.
“Your best estimate?” Hale asked Rogers. They had worked together on the nuclear submarine Roosevelt, which, after sink
ing an enemy sub and sustaining considerable damage herself, had to be scuttled in the Arctic lest her vital coding machines be captured.
“Present speed, submerged,” said Rogers, his tone controlled and assured. “Plus or minus twenty-five knots. Displacement… plus or minus two point five. I’d say Soviet Kilo class. Three thousand eight hundred yards and closing. Bearing zero-three-niner.”
“Man battle stations!” ordered Hale, the chime alert bonging softly throughout the submarine. “Speed?”
“Twenty knots,” answered Rogers.
“Hard left rudder to one-three-five degrees,” ordered Hale.
“Left rudder to one-three-five degrees,” confirmed Rogers, the diving officer watching rudder and trim control.
“Bearing?” asked Hale.
“Zero-three-niner,” came the response.
“Mark! Range?”
“Four thousand.”
“Angle on the bow,” said Hale, beginning the litany of his attack. “Starboard one-four. Firing point procedures. Master one-zero. Tube one.”
“Firing point procedures. Master one-zero. Tube one,” came the confirmation. “Solution ready, sir. Weapons ready. Ship ready.”
“Final bearing and shoot,” announced Hale. “Master one-zero. Tube one.”
Bearing and speed confirmed, the firing officer took over the procedure. “Stand by! Shoot! Fire!… One fired and running.” The sine wave that was the other sub changed its vector on the screen, then fired.
“Shift to zero-eight-five,” commanded Hale, gripping the periscope island rail, anticipating the turn.
“Zero-eight-five, sir.”
“Very well. Fire two.”
“Fire two. Two fired and running, sir.”
“Take her to four hundred. Maximum angle two-zero degrees.”
“Four hundred. Maximum two-zero degrees.”
The second Mk-48 of Reagan’s two Mk-48s was homing in, the enemy unable to shake off its lock-on.
