by Ian Slater
As Dick Norton radioed back to the main force, now collecting about the railhead a quarter mile back, he knew they were in serious trouble. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, a couple of howitzers and heavy mortars could do to stop the giant 250-ton, 155-foot-long, fifty-five-foot-wide air-cushion assault Aist crafts. These amphibians, propelled forward by two push, two pull props and driven by two gas NK-12 MV turbine engines at over seventy-five miles per hour, could move about a hundred times faster on the mirror-smooth ice than could the two 155mm guns or their crews. And each of the ten 250-ton Aists, in addition to carrying 250 fully armed shock troops, boasted eight surface-to-air Grail missiles which could make very short work of the remaining choppers — and of anything else.
As if to support Dick Norton’s pessimism, the snowfall eased and Freeman, through the ten-power binoculars, could see white blobs on white, the tiny, hard snow racing at him like huge tracer. Through the dancing screen of the snow particles, he could see what appeared to be clouds of steam — the “up-blow” of snow and moisture from the Aists’ one-foot-high cushion of air, billowing out from beneath the bulbous rubber skirting on each of the huge craft.
Behind and all around him, Freeman could hear the sappers and mortar crews arriving, and behind them the clank of the two howitzers’ anchor spades in the snow and ice.
Norton, too, could see the Aists — there were not eight, but ten — still out of the howitzers’ effective range but steadily growing bigger, like blunt-nosed destroyers, their superstructure bulky and bullying in appearance. They were big targets, but Norton knew there was no way two howitzers could handle the Aists, with the Siberian crafts’ maneuverability. Freeman announced that if he were the Siberian commander, he would deploy the 250 troops aboard each Aist into the taiga for a flank attack before using the PT-76 tanks, four aboard each Aist, and their five-mile-range Grail SN-5 missiles. The second thing he’d do, he said, would be to use the Aists, which could not traverse the timber taiga, for a swerving S frontal attack against the railhead. Norton’s accurate estimate that such a maneuver would mean no less than two and a half thousand enemy shock troops coming at them was interrupted by someone shouting that the fleet of Aists — which Norton could now see clearly through his binoculars — were moving closer to the taiga. They were about a hundred yards apart and five miles away, to the right of the American position, and now turning to their left — to the Americans’ right — the up-blow from the assembled Aists’ skirts forming a huge flour-white cloud of snow. Norton could see their shock troops unloading, streaming out of the white cloud like small wooden sticks, disappearing into the snowy umbrellaed taiga.
The Aists closest to the forest having spewed out their human cargo, now moved off and were forming up in single file so as to deny Freeman any effective lateral fire. Their commander was obviously intent, as Freeman had predicted, on a frontal attack against the Americans, the second part of what was obviously going to be a scissor offensive. One blade would be made up of the shock troops from the Aists moving now through the timber, cutting in toward Freeman from his right flank and putting stiffener into Malik’s two motorized regiments, which had been driven back into the forest from the railroad only a short time before. The other blade would be the Aist attack itself.
Freeman grabbed the field phone and relayed his instructions, his paratroopers taking up positions all along the rail line left and right of his Humvee, picking the spots where the rail lines, encrusted with ice, formed the rim of a slight rise in the ground, the rise having been man-made in order to lift this section of the Trans-Siberian above flood level. It created a natural firing mound behind which Freeman’s sappers also set up their mortars, several of the crews already crouching over the dial sights, the two howitzer crews — pathetically, it seemed to Dick Norton, yet bravely — aligning the guns against the missile-armed Aists.
Freeman’s two remaining Lynx choppers, one of them with the patched fuel tank, rose like huge dragonflies frightened by noise, their cargo nets of pressure mines slung pendulously beneath them as they headed to the right, west of Nizhneangarsk, to do what Freeman, still glued to his binoculars, called, “A little oat sowing.” Still watching the Aists for the first wink of a missile, he shouted over the roar of the choppers to Dick Norton about the mines. “Mightn’t help stop their infantry, Dick… but it sure as hell’ll slow ‘em up. Damned if I’d like to be feeling my way through the forest, fearing any moment I’d be wearing my balls for a necklace.”
“Yes, sir,” said Norton. “But the Aists — I know their missiles aren’t any good over five miles, but what are you going to do when they—”
“Oh, you beautiful bastards!” yelled Freeman without taking his eyes from the binoculars. Norton took up his and, in the circle of eye-blinding white, saw the Aists — or rather one of them, obscuring any view of the others, which had apparently lined up behind the leader. It presented Freeman’s artillerymen, for all the good the two 155mms could do, with the smallest possible cross-section of target, and only one target at that. It was a frontal attack, all right, just as Freeman had predicted. Hopefully, thought Norton, the hero of Pyongyang and Ratmanov had also figured out a defense!
“We’ve only got two friggin’ guns,” said one of the loaders, pulling on his helmet but careful not to strap it lest an explosion’s concussion tear his head off. “Why the hell doesn’t the old man open up, now we’ve got ‘em in range? Might be lucky and pick off the lead one, anyway. Least do some friggin’ damage.”
“Don’t ask me,” commented the battery officer. “General told us not to fire until he gives us the green light.”
After calling the Aists “beautiful bastards” for the second time, and several of his treetop spotters reporting there were twelve and not ten of them, Freeman gave the two-howitzer battery and the sappers the order to fire. Norton involuntarily jumped, startled by the feral roar and crash of mortar bombs and sapper charges. Freeman was pushing him down for safety behind the Humvee as the frigid air came alive with the singing of deadly ice particles whizzing overhead.
At first Norton thought the Aists’ frontal attack had begun already, although he knew that the Grail missiles were still not in range. It was a minute later as he glanced back at the two 155mm howitzers, seeing their belching flame and hearing the clang of ejected casings, that he realized what was happening and why all the explosions seemed so close. It was because they were close. The two gun crews, like the sappers, were following Freeman’s orders to the letter, ignoring the rapidly approaching Aists, now only seven miles off and closing fast. The mortar crews were firing their bombs in a 180-degree left-right “fan arc,” its farthest point only a hundred yards or so in front of them, and not at the Aists, now less than six miles — four minutes — away from them, racing toward the Americans at seventy-plus miles per hour across the perfectly unobstructed ice. Instead of firing at the Aists, the Americans were firing into the three-foot ice several hundred yards out into the lake. For the howitzers it was point-blank range.
“Give the bastards a bit of their own medicine! Goddamn Mongols!” declared Freeman as ice chips smacked into his Humvee, the explosions from the heavy mortars and the sappers’ C-4 HE packs acting like depth charges, chopping and smashing up what had been the mirrored surface of the lake. Within minutes it was a boiling jumble of mini icebergs, rolling over and over in the man-made turbulence, some of the bergs’ jagged tops rising over five feet above the water.
Then Norton saw it in a flash: the Aists, with a draft of only one foot, might have difficulty negotiating above a bumpy terrain. As it turned out, there was no difficulty; there was only disaster, the Aists balking for a moment or two, clearly decelerating, their up-blow of snow increasing, then, ironically, rapidly decreasing as they hit full throttle, hoping to get enough air cushion to overrun the Americans. In Freeman’s elegant phrase, the icebergs, sticking up like giant knives, “ripped the ass off” the Aists, causing a pileup the likes of which Norton had never seen.
One Aist’s Drum Tilt fire-control radar took off like a flying saucer. Another Aist’s bow ramp imploded, pierced by the ice, the Aist rolling, its lift fans coming to pieces with the sound of some monstrous air conditioner suddenly filled with metal chips, particles of ice having passed through the protective mesh, buckling the fans’ blades.
The Aist, still rolling, now capsized, the display of its enormous black bottom looking somehow obscene, covered as it was in a froth of chocolate-mousse-colored bubbles; one of the hovercraft’s enormous push propellers, still functioning, having whipped up hydraulic fluid into a frenzied spill that soon all but obscured the rubber skirting. “God damn it, Dick!” yelled Freeman, one hand putting his helmet back on after a concussion had blown it off, the other hand pulling out his Sig Sauer nine-millimeter. “Looks like Tacoma Demolition Derby out there! Goddamn Mongols!” He fired until his magazine was empty, oblivious of shots being fired his way, slapping in a new clip, firing again into the boiling sea of blood and ice and dying Siberians amidst which Norton again didn’t feel it politic to point out that these weren’t Mongols, but Siberians. He knew what the general meant. Freeman had told Washington he would avenge the slaughter of III Corps. But even so, Freeman had given strict orders that any Sibir who put up his hands — gave any sign of surrender — was to be treated accordingly, fished out, assisted as required, and put in line to be airlifted back to Khabarovsk.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The immediate effect of the Aist disaster meant that now Freeman’s paras could give all their attention to preparing in-depth defenses of Nizhneangarsk. Freeman opted for a “broken diamond” of razor wire, two hundred yards a side, the pattern which had been used to telling effect against the Japanese in the jungles of New Guinea in ‘42 to ‘45. The fact that there was so much snow to help hide the spring-coiled razor wire as it was unraveled to form a diamond shape helped his plan. The left top run of wire went out for fifty yards or so beyond the end of the top right run, creating die impression to anyone approaching the railhead that the top of the diamond was open — that there was a gap blown open in the perimeter defense. Either that or they’d assume there’d been a break in the wire. But once through the break, they would in fact have entered a trap, wire on their left and right, coming to a closed V. Dug in behind the bottom of the wire V would be a corresponding V of American machine guns.
To keep the approaching Siberians unloaded earlier from the Aist occupied, Freeman sent patrols a mile east of Nizhneangarsk around the lake’s edge so as to avoid the mines and to engage any Siberians who tried making their way out of the taiga to the less obstructed lake edge. In this way, the Siberian shock troops were being herded back into the forest and ultimately into the diamond of wire. In this, Freeman, as he’d anticipated, was aided by the slow going of the Siberian troops due to the mines that had been scattered by the Lynxes in the forest between Nizhneangarsk and the Aist troop drop-off point.
* * *
Personally directing the layout of the razor wire at the railhead, Freeman was pleased to notice that while they had plenty of snow with which to hide the bottom V, the blizzard itself was letting up, which meant that he could soon expect air drops to resupply and thus consolidate his position. It meant he could also now order M-1 tanks westward on the Baikal-Amur-Magistral line to Nizhneangarsk to meet any counterattack that might be contemplated by Litvinov’s northern army around Yakutsk.
The long-range effect of Freeman’s taking the railhead, quite apart from the fact that M-1 tanks were now rolling westward to Nizhneangarsk under heavy fighter protection, was that he had, as hoped, not only struck the Siberians a counterattack on their home ground, which would strike a blow at Siberian morale in general, but in doing so had created the massive diversion of vitally needed Siberian troops from the south around Baikal. This not only caused Yesov to lose the momentum of his eastward lunge, but simultaneously enabled what was left of III Corps to make the eastern side of the lake and to escape into the taiga and join the troops heading south. In all, Freeman having thrown Yesov off his stride had bought valuable time for Second Army to continue its buildup on the Chinese border.
Still, Freeman knew that a breakthrough of his in the south — any attempt to take the general offensive against the Chinese — would be impossible unless the Nanking Bridge was blown, cutting the logistical tail of the PLA, the vital line of supply for Cheng’s northern Chinese armies.
As if to underscore the tentativeness of his Nizhneangarsk victory, there was a sudden swish of air, like that of an automobile passing another at high speed on a highway, and Freeman was yanked down into oil-stained snow by Dick Norton, both of them lifted bodily by the concussion of the hundred-millimeter shell hitting Freeman’s Humvee twenty yards away. There was a soft woof, the Humvee — or rather, its buckled chassis — split and afire, the scarred snow around it a junkyard of Humvee parts, its burning engine spewing out a thick, churning column of soot-black smoke.
“What in hell—” began Freeman, but immediately hit the ground again, as did Norton and the others, a second round hitting the burning hulk with a loud whang, the chassis disintegrating, filling the air with shrapnel. For a moment Norton, deafened by the noise of the impact, couldn’t hear what the general was saying. Freeman hauled himself out of the snow, dusted himself off and pulled out the Beretta from his belt band. “God damn it! That’s the second time. No need for that!”
The general’s outrage was directed at something none of the Americans had seen during the chaotic fighting amid the Aist pileup: some of the Siberians being hauled out of the frigid waters of Lake Baikal were still fighting.
The last three Aists had floundered, but seven of their twelve PT-76 up-gunned cannon amphibious tanks had been able to roll off the Aist before the latter had been taken out by the now point-blank howitzer fire. These seven tanks were now firing their hundred-millimeter cannon even as they swam with flotation boards out toward the American positions at ten kilometers an hour, navigating their way through, and largely protected from American fire by, the very icebergs that had incapacitated their mother ships.
Perhaps Norton was the only one who fully understood Freeman’s outrage at the appearance of the amphibious PT-76s. They had been the nemesis of his armor earlier in the war. The “goddamned coffeepots,” as he called them, had been used to killing effect in North Korea, the relatively light, amphibious PT-76s, at only fourteen tons, able to move with much more maneuverability in the flooded Korean paddies than could the heavy Abrams M-1s’ sixty tons. But if the NKA had unleashed hundreds of them in the flooded rice paddies where they could move much more easily and could ford swollen streams with their flotation skirting, and the sixty-ton M-1s were often stuck and found it difficult if not impossible to negotiate on the flood plain, at least here at Nizhneangarsk the game was over for the PT-76s.
Or so it seemed.
For some inexplicable reason — perhaps because the driver of the PT-76 was concussed by the enfilade of 155mm and heavy mortar fire raining down about him, one PT-76 of the seven now approaching the Americans’ position had its lights on, and in the snow made a wonderful target, attracting fire from every kind of weapon the Americans had. Its turret suddenly imploded and it was gone in a huge bubble, along with a cheer from several of the mortar crews. Only Freeman and the paratroop commander woke up to the ploy at once and had started to yell at the mortars and antitank LAW crews to spread their fire among the others, but a quick-thinking and brave Siberian commander had succeeded nevertheless. While every “Tom, Dick, and goddamn Harry,” as Freeman later reported, “was throwing everything but his socks,” including infrared homing rounds, at that PT-76 with its lights on, the remaining six amphibians had precious seconds to find “breaching” aprons of ice that allowed them to get a grip onto the mainland at the edge of the fan-shaped sea and to fire back. In those few seconds at least three got off a hundred-millimeter round each, one of these taking out one of Freeman’s 155mm howitzer crews. There was an
other round, screaming overhead — so low that Freeman and Norton could feel its heat wash a split second before it hit one of the two Lynxes, which had come down to refill its “string bag” with antipersonnel mines. The explosion of the chopper was more a burst of black oil not yet alight, then a crimson flash followed by a deep, steady roar as the antipersonnel mines went off, filling the air with fragments that killed or wounded thirty-six of Freeman’s paratroopers nearby.
The PT-76s paid dearly as the one-man portable one-shot LAW antitank weapons nearest them were brought to bear, the six-pound AT rounds sinking all but one of the remaining six amphibians. Some of the Siberians afire inside these tanks were trying desperately to get out, the sound of them beating against the inside of the cupolas whose seals had been warped under impact of the antitank rounds clearly audible to the LAW teams. Only one cupola managed to open, and a gunner, aflame, tried futilely to abandon the tank, falling forward as the tank went down, its gun coming up, striking him face-on and knocking him back into the water. The man was pushed toward the edge of the ice by a wave from the sinking tank, its gun, now at a crazy, sky-pointing angle, disappearing into an enormous bubbling, the tank’s chopped-up flotation boards ripped, letting the tank slide backward into the oblivion of three thousand feet of water.
“I’ll tell you, Dick,” said Freeman. “I don’t envy those poor bastards.”
There was no reply. When Freeman turned about, Norton was out cold, his left hand lost from view in the blood gushing from his left eye.
“Medic!” yelled Freeman.
With the medic came more bad news. SATINT over China showed what the G-2 officer surmised had been a pinpoint burst of light situated about a mile upstream of the Nanking Bridge. Freeman said nothing, kneeling by Norton, who had been with him since his days in Europe, since Ratmanov.
