by Ian Slater
Four “Saran-wrapped” Lynx helicopters going out on the skids of their C-130 transport also got into trouble. Despite the multiple braking chutes on the C-130’s palette, the latter crashed through the ice cover of a pond at the edge of the salt marsh, disappearing in about fifteen feet of water. Another badly damaged Lynx was lost when its palette, having been blown off course into the timber, ended up in a mass of splintered treetops, dangling chute segments hanging forlornly, ripped by severed branches that had been broken off like matchsticks under the impact. Several of the branches had pierced the weather-protective wrap of the helo, impaling fuselage and tail rotors, warping the chopper’s main blades and its chaff dispensers. The result was thousands of varying lengths of the silvered antiradar foil blown about aimlessly in the storm like silver streamers from some abandoned New Year’s party.
One of the two remaining Lynxes’ AH1’s landing skis had been bent, but a paratrooper master sergeant had it fixed within five minutes — taking his assault knife, stripping a fir branch and lashing it with parachute cord to the ski, just as he would have splinted a broken leg. There was a tree-toppling crash that resounded throughout the entire drop area — one of the six eighteen-mile-range ultralightweight titanium 155mm field howitzers hitting and passing through the marsh ice. The other five guns, though two were almost buried in snowdrifts, were quickly assembled and their small but powerful-tracked vehicle haulers brought up, as well as Humvee-mounted PADS — positive azimuth determining gyro systems.
The PADS meant that within ten minutes the howitzers were laying direct Copperhead and RAP — right with boat tail — HE rounds fire against the BAM railhead just over three miles to the south. The accuracy of the four-round-a-minute fire was also due to one of the Lynx choppers serving as “fire control” after it and the only other serviceable Lynx had hauled their “baskets”—flip-bottomed mesh boxes of Heat-SFW, self-forging high-explosive, antitank warhead mines — scattering them in a rough circle around the quarter-mile-square drop zone. This left only one side, a southern exit toward the BAM, open for the attack on Nizhneangarsk Station itself — an attack that hopefully would not only sever the vital east-west supply line afforded Yesov by the BAM railway, but also cut off the Siberian Sixty-fourth and other divisions already moving east between Baikal and Yerofey Pavlovich.
For the moment, despite the loss of some of his bombers and helos, Freeman was as satisfied as a commander could expect to be — with only a two percent casualty rate of sprained ankles and jarred spines. Except for the man lost aboard the C-130, there had been no concussion-caused deaths, scores of men landing on the frozen, reed-tufted marsh, feet flying out from under them on the ice before they could roll properly and release their chutes.
* * *
Colonel General Litvinov, the military commander of all Siberian northern forces, including Kirensk garrison, 140 miles northwest of the north end of Lake Baikal, received a panicky call from Nizhneangarsk. It was from the recently appointed commander of the railhead’s two infantry regiments—4,500 men, eighty tanks, thirty-six 122mm self-propelled howitzers, twenty-eight armored personnel carriers, and two antitank batteries of fifty-five men each. The commander’s tone was rising by the second, for despite bad weather moving in — another arctic blizzard forecast— patrols were reporting that beneath the heavy overcast, American airborne troops in their hundreds, possibly thousands, were landing only four miles away in the taiga.
Litvinov, however, remained calm. He could afford to be; he was well away from Nizhneangarsk. Besides, he was under strict orders from Novosibirsk to keep his division of eighteen thousand — six thousand fighting men and twelve thousand in support — at Kirensk. Marshal Yesov had stressed that the Kirensk division must be so held for possible deployment to Yakutsk, eight hundred miles to the northeast, should the Americans decide to attack there. Along with Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, and Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk was one of the most strategically and industrially important cities in Siberia.
“What can we do?” shouted the general from Nizhneangarsk, whose two regiments had been assigned the specific responsibility of guarding the BAM railhead, his anxiety fueled by the memory of his one-time superior at Nizhneangarsk. The latter had been arrested by the OMON before the cease-fire for what Novosibirsk was pleased to call “insufficient initiative” in having failed to recapture those prisoners who had escaped through the taiga following the Allied raid on Port Baikal. Whether or not this was the real reason for his execution or a cover for a power struggle in Novosibirsk, the general had been court-martialed and shot by OMON enforcers.
“Uspokoysya, idiot!” Calm down, you idiot! Litvinov shouted into the phone. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”
“You say that — you’re not here. There must be…” The line was crackling, and he told Kirensk that one of the American Dikie volki was jamming.
“The what?”
“Dikie volki! Dikie volki!” Wild Wolves! Wild Wolves! repeated the Nizhneangarsk general.
“Diki lasochki!” Wild Weasels! corrected Litvinov.
“I don’t care what you call them,” said the Nizhneangarsk commander, “they’re already cutting… communica—”
“Put your deputy on the extension,” demanded Litvinov. “Immediately. And you stay on the line.”
When the two Nizhneangarsk officers were on the line, Litvinov curtly announced, “General, you’re dismissed. Colonel, you are now commanding general of Nizhneangarsk defenses. How many Americans do you suspect have landed?”
“Two — possibly three thousand, sir,” answered the colonel — now General Fyodor Malik.
“Bozne moy!” My God! “You outnumber them two to one. Outflank them and attack immediately. Do you hear?”
The newly promoted general had to ask Litvinov to repeat the order; the line was fading by the second.
The demoted general was in shock, not knowing whether to feel relieved, insulted, or both. He knew he was afraid. Family connections had got him his command, but Uncle Vilna couldn’t help him now. He was shaking. He could hear Litvinov’s voice on the phone again through the frying sound of the static.
“All you have to… General,” Litvinov advised his newly promoted colleague, Malik, “is… send a message to… ort Baikal. Give them the coordinates of the U.S. Airborne and they’ll take care… Tell them… release the Aists.”
Malik frowned, but then, aware of his previous commander watching him, smiled knowingly. “Of course. I will call them immediate—” The line went dead.
The demoted general’s voice, now wavering between outrage and unmitigated fright, was tremulous and rising. “And how will you get any message to Port Baikal now?” he shouted. “No phone! What are the Aists? How can we—”
“By helicopter,” Malik replied, unsure as to how he should address his former boss. “We’ll send two helicopters with the message,” he explained. “They’ll be there in two and half hours — less with drop tanks and no troop load.”
“And what will happen then?”
Malik wondered if the comrade was serious, but merely put his confusion down to his hyperanxiety.
“The Aists,” Malik explained calmly. “You heard, Litvinov has released them. Once they’ve got the coordinates, they’ll slaughter Freeman and his troops.”
“How do you know it’s Freeman?”
“Because,” said Malik, the new authority growing on him by the second, sweeping over him now like the pleasure of a mounting orgasm as he carefully but quickly wrote out the coordinates and gave a copy each to both Hind D chopper pilots. “Of course it’s Freeman. It’s his style — to attack where you least expect it.” Malik straightened up from the desk. “Freeman loves the underdog’s position. Makes winning all the sweeter for him. But now he’s made a bad mistake, Gen — uh, Colonel. But now he’s finished.”
Malik told the two helicopter pilots that en route over the 350 miles of taiga between Nizhneangarsk and Port Baikal they must remain on radio silence rather than ris
k detection by an American AWAC. Even if the American advanced warning aircraft were hundreds of miles off, their rotodome radar could nevertheless pick the helos up if they used their radio and, though it was unlikely, might be able to get an American fighter through the fog and the ring of Baikal’s AA gun and missile defenses. “Meantime,” Malik told the commanders of his two motorized rifle regiments, “we’ll prepare a little surprise for Freeman here.” With that, Malik strode to the map and drew in two arrows aimed at hitting Freeman’s Airborne simultaneously on the American’s western and eastern flanks. “Get every civilian in town that you can find. Issue them with greatcoats and take them to the front. Any resistance to your order and they’ll be charged with gulgiganstvo.” It meant “hooliganism” against the CIS — the Commonwealth of Independent States — and just as in the old Soviet Union, it would get you one-to-five in a “labor” battalion. Malik turned and looked past the man who had been his commander to the infantry major who would be in charge of calling out the civilians. Malik’s tone was steely, brooking no objection. “Have them surrender to the Americans in twos and threes over the next hour.”
The major was stunned.
“It will slow them down,” Malik explained. “The Americans are soft about prisoners. Freeman will also be slowed down by the blizzard coming south. It will be here in a few hours. By then our Aists at Baikal’ll do the rest.”
Malik couldn’t hide, nor did he wish to hide, the look of satisfaction on his face as he now saw the wisdom of Novosibirsk’s long-standing insistence, based on the experience of the Nazis, that all military garrisons be manned as far as possible by troops from another oblast. A garrison made up in part of local conscripts or volunteers were naturally tied too closely to their fellows in the town, rather than to the iron fist of military necessity. It meant there would be no difficulty in having his troops round up the locals for the surrender.
* * *
As Freeman’s troops continued to advance on Nizhneangarsk, fog was rolling over the frozen marshes, and the general ordered Dick Norton and his two aides in the Humvee to pray for good weather. “God damn it,” opined Freeman, “the Almighty answered Georgie Patton’s prayers at Bastogne — He can answer mine.” Only Dick Norton knew he wasn’t joking. But later, as the cold front kept moving south, a disgruntled captain, whose Humvee windscreen was being constantly splattered with lumps of snow kicked up by the treads of Freeman’s Humvee, was heard to mutter that apparently this day Second Army was out of favor with the Almighty.
“By God,” said Freeman as he, too, saw any hope of close air support disappearing, “we’re being punished for White House stupidity! If I’d been allowed to pursue these sons of bitches when we had ‘em on the run before that goddamn cease-fire, we’d—”
“General, sir!” FORs — forward observer reports — were flooding in on the Humvee’s FLAP — flat panel lap display — to the effect that Nizhneangarsk was falling without a fight. And apparently Intelligence had screwed up; those surrendering weren’t crack troops at all, but the infirm and inexperienced — old men and young boys. “Even women, General…”
“Maybe,” proffered an incredulous Dick Norton, “your prayers are being answered, General. Their Motorized must be pulling back.”
“Possibly,” conceded Freeman. It was difficult in the now heavily falling snow to tell whether the general was grinning with the anticipation of easy victory or whether he was grimacing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Hundreds of miles to the south, atop A-7, the barrel of Aussie Lewis’s Heckler & Koch 11 A1 was steaming in the early morning fog. “Like a bloody Chinese laundry,” he quipped as he reached forward, right thumb squeezing the barrel’s plastic-coated handle, rotating it hard left, pushing it forward, then back and hard right, dumping it out on the snow, slipping in the spare, the gun back on full automatic in less than six seconds. “Too fucking slow!” he told himself, and he was right, but he’d taken a second to make sure the spare barrel wasn’t plugged with snow. In minus fifty degrees, snow would turn to ice in the barrel, and bam! You’d blow your head off.
In a wide left-right sweep, the gun’s backwash warming his face, Lewis dropped at least five, maybe six, of the Siberians, but they kept coming, and a few yards to his right David Brentwood was tossing his last frag grenade even as they heard the beautiful, bowel-turning roar of the Spectre reappearing, lighting the clouds in giant, swelling red sores. The fire-spitting dragon went into a tight anticlockwise corkscrew, forcing many of the would-be attackers back into the heavy timber, crackling now from the Vulcan’s forty-millimeter and 105mm howitzer rounds as if on fire.
“You bloody beaut!” yelled Aussie Lewis in praise of the Spectre. “Jesus Christ, you Yanks can make machines,” he told David. “I’ll give you that.”
“One o’clock, two of—” called David, but Aussie — or was it Choir Williams? — had already fired, downing two Siberians. The real trouble, however, was that in the moat of snow-filled craters that lay between the heavy timber and the rough hundred-yard-diameter circle of SAS/D men still holding out on A-7’s summit, any fighting between the circle and the timber confused the Spectre’s operators. The gunship’s sensors couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe, especially when both SAS/D men and the Siberians were wearing American uniforms. Already David Brentwood suspected that several SAS men had been killed in the initial well-intentioned enfilade from the Spectre, and radio contact with the gunship confirmed the confusion.
“We’ll try to keep ‘em bottled up in the trees,” the gunship’s pilot told Brentwood, his voice fighting to be heard in the cacophony of air and ground battle. “But you guys’ll have to establish a chopper zone…”
“Roger!” responded David Brentwood, asking urgently, “ETA for the choppers? Repeat, ETA—”
“Fifteen minutes max,” answered the Spectre, the pilot’s voice quickly lost in the roar of the twin Vulcans tattooing the gray blur of timber below with what seemed solid tracer, more explosions and flares, the Chinese now attacking the Siberians, who in turn were attacking the ring of SAS/D men.
“Fubar!” shouted Aussie, clipping in another mag of 5.56mm, by which he meant he was in the middle of a fog in a fog of war, confusing even for the usually confused state of close-quarter battle; a situation, in short, that in the SAS/D lexicon was definitely, undeniably fubar-”fucked up beyond all recognition!” Chinese were fighting Siberians who were fighting Americans who were fighting everybody. “Where are those fucking choppers? I’m out of ammo!” yelled Aussie. David Brentwood tossed him a drum. It was the most anxious he’d ever seen the Australian, the man who was normally so cool, stressed now by the fear not so much of dying, but of dying at the hand of his own mates. “Jesus Christ, Choir!” yelled Aussie. “Stop! You mad fucking Welshman!” Choir Williams had stopped, though just in time, his 180- degree arc of fire kicking up snow just short of Lewis and David’s position. Salvini, on the far right, saw another two SAS men badly hit and sent up yet another purple flare for the Medevac choppers to see — if they ever came.
“Where are the bastards?” Aussie began, but then ducked, his Kevlar helmet pushed hard into the snow, legs drawn up into the fetal position, his right arm pulling David Brentwood down by the collar as a heavy mortar round went off, shaking the earth, showering them with a black-white spew of snow and earth. “Our chopper pilots wankin’ themselves off or something?” He saw a tongue of machine gun fire in the timber and answered with a long burst with the HK 11.
“Well, I’m not!” It was a man called Edison, nicknamed “Lightbulb,” who’d dragged himself over to Aussie and Brentwood’s position, his left leg a mass of bloody pulp, but Edison not yet in shock. “Down to my last clip,” he told Aussie. David tore the last one he had from his vest and picked out a body twenty feet in front of him, one of the Siberians he’d stopped, whom he might ransack for ammo and—
They heard the distinctive wokka! wokka! wokka! of the Chinook-47 Evac choppers, closing.
“Fucking cavalry’s arrived,” said Lewis, and gave a shape moving through the aspen stand fifty yards away a quick, deadly burst. Suddenly the sky was brighter than the sun, so intensely lit that for a moment all firing stopped, as the Spectre turned to oxblood-red, then black, the sound of it exploding creating a ringing in David’s ears. And only now did they hear the sonic boom of the MiG fighter, a Fulcrum-29 that had downed the Spectre and was now screaming low overhead, banking in a tight turn away to the west. No one had predicted a lone MiG would dare Bingo fuel — an empty tank — at the farthest extent of his plane’s operational radius and try to interdict the gunship.
But nothing was predictable. Certainly no one in the SAS/D company could have had any way of knowing that the MiG-29 was flown by Siberia’s top ace, Sergei Marchenko, whose Fulcrum sported the Yankee killer motif left forward of the left engine’s box intake.
Within hours Novosibirsk was boasting about Marchenko’s bravery, which was undeniable, but the propaganda broadcast failed to point out the element of sheer luck involved in hitting the gunship in the thick fog. In its spiraling turn, the gunship, its guns ablaze, had quite unexpectedly presented Marchenko with a target that a child couldn’t have missed. Having made only one pass, he easily downed it with a two-hundred-pound Aphid air-to-air missile traveling at nine hundred feet a second, before pulling out all the stops to disappear westward into the safety net of Baikal’s AA ring.
To all Siberia, Marchenko was a hero. But to the SAS/D men — several of them wounded and dying in their fighting retreat into the choppers, where ironically the downdraft from the Chinooks was so fierce that it knocked them off the rope ladders — Marchenko only added to the sense of bitterness they felt with their discovery that it hadn’t been the Americans who’d started the war. To them Marchenko was no better than a vulture. He’d come in not on equal terms, but merely to turkey-shoot the lumbering AC-130, and then he’d “hopped it,” as Choir Williams described it, to the safety west of Baikal, out of the American air striker reach.
