by Ian Slater
“Standby plan is this,” explained David quietly. “If we get a go from Freeman, we’ll be flown — Mach-plus transport — to the carrier Salt Lake City. It’s moving in as close as possible to the coast. Then we go into the area north of Nanking under the radar screen via a Pave — one of the two that took them in. But we don’t go for the actual assist unless we get an emergency call sign. No call sign, we assume they’re all dead.”
“What is it?” asked Salvini.
“Mars.”
“No,” said Salvini. “What’s the assist?”
“STABO.”
Choir Williams shook his head at the acronyms the bureaucrats had thought up. STABO technically meant “stabilized tactical airborne body operation.” And like most military acronyms, it made it all sound banal and straightforward, like taking the bus, the danger obfuscated by the bloodless officialese.
“Well hell,” said Aussie, “we weren’t planning anything for today, were we?” He looked around.
“I’d rather be playing football,” said Choir wryly, adopting Aussie’s tone, knowing that no matter what they said, David Brentwood would feel badly about them all being involved in the mission, figuring that in a way they were doing it as a favor for him, inadvertently making him feel responsible.
“Football!” said Aussie, a mock sneer on his face. “D’you mean real football, Choir? Australian rules?”
“Australian rules?” echoed Choir, looking bemused at Salvini and David. “Now there’s a contradiction in terms.”
“Don’t be so fucking rude!” said Aussie, picking up the mags for his 7.62mm mini and turning his attention to David Brentwood. “How many of us, Davey?”
“Four,” answered David. “I’m going, but if any of you don’t—” He stopped; the others were already picking up their gear.
“Maybe they won’t need an assist,” said Salvini.
“Right!” said Aussie.
“And pigs fly,” replied David, looking straight at him. “Right?”
“You mean Welshmen?” said Aussie. “Oh yeah — they fly all the time.”
“I hope we don’t have to go in,” said David. “I mean, I hope they get the bridge and—”
“They’ll get it,” said Salvini, though knowing he’d fail a polygraph test.
“One for the books, hey, Davey?” said Aussie.
“What’s that?”
“Our mob — SAS/D — helping out the navy. Jesus, they’ll never forgive us.”
“Hadn’t thought of it that way,” said David, momentarily cheered by the Australian’s light banter in the face of the odds.
“Well, you should have, mate. A Pave can accommodate us all, I take it?”
“No problem.”
“Well, if it gets too heavy, we’ll just throw Choir out.”
“May I remind you, Mr. Brentwood, sir,” said Choir, “that Sergeant Lewis here owes me and Salvini fifteen bucks. I authorize you to collect in my absence.”
“Mercenary bastard!” riposted Aussie. “That all you think about? Dough? Filthy lucre?”
What Choir was thinking about was a filthy river, three miles wide, and trying to extract SEALs — if there were any survivors — by ST ABO.
The quartermaster caught up with them in the mess. He told them the STABO harnesses were ready. David Brentwood looked solemn. “Thanks.”
They sat there waiting for the transport to the jet that would whisk them southeast to the carrier. His hands cupping a second mug of coffee, Aussie’s head suddenly shot up like an eagle spotting unsuspecting prey. “Hey, you jokers,” he said, looking at Salvini and Choir. “We’re only on standby unless we get the SEALs emergency call. As of now I owe you sweet fuck-all.”
“Technicality,” charged Choir.
“Technicality my ass. Ha! And you thought you could pull one over—“
“Mr. Brentwood, sir?”
David Brentwood looked around. It was the quartermaster again. “Yes?”
“Sir, General Freeman’s HQ says, ‘Go.’ Bridge down or not, he wants to have you guys in the area if they call.”
“Hey,” said Aussie, his eyes turned on the hapless quartermaster. “Shouldn’t you be in fuckin’ bed?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The sheen above Dennison and Robert Brentwood, now like a dull mirror on a darkened ceiling, wasn’t moonlight, for in patches it was particularly intense. A minute later they realized that the blobs of concentrated light, not moving, were fixed floodlights on the bridge, and crisscrossing the dull, silvered roof of ligns that was the river-air interface were enormous black rectangular shapes — the shadows cast on the water by the gargantuan X-shaped truss girders.
They surfaced slowly, silently, in one of the shadows, and their worst fears were confirmed. Bridge floodlights, spaced a hundred yards apart, were switched on along the southern side of the bridge, and far over to their right, toward the eastern shore about two hundred yards from that side of the river’s edge, was a long, black, snakelike object. As his eyes adjusted to the infrared lenses, Brentwood recognized it as a long line of river craft of all shapes and sizes, from small sampans and medium-sized junks to the big propane barge, all halted and forced to cast anchor a quarter mile upstream from the bridge.
And it was then that he saw the two men — Rose and Smythe — tied to the outer rail of the bridge, a hundred feet above the midway point on the span between piers four and five — like two black crosses, still clad in their rubber wet suits. Far below them, in the penumbra of the floodlights, the huge black shadows of the trusses shivered in eddies about the massive concrete piers, and now there was a lot more noise — shouted commands on the bridge, the distant rumble of another approaching train, only this time an empty one coming down from the north.
Brentwood knew it would be impossible to scale the pier and place the “earmuffs” as planned. But just as quickly, with the speed of a sub captain firing a snap torpedo shot, he knew what he must do, like seeing a fuzzy slide jump into focus.
There was barely time to convey the information to Dennison, including the GPS coordinates of the new rendezvous point he’d decided on. Even with the racket on the bridge added to by the rattle of the goods train, Brentwood was cognizant of just how far the human voice could carry over water, and quickly reverted to sign language during the lull that followed the train. It took him only a minute to explain it, but to Dennison, who expected a searchlight from the right bank to have him in its beam any second, it seemed much longer.
As Dennison checked his COBRA pack, he got a whiff of foul air blown down by the north wind from the flooded levees. Slipping beneath the dark water, the last thing he saw through his mask was the two blurred cruciform shapes of Rose and Smythe tied against the outer pedestrian railing of the seemingly endless black bridge. Going deep to forty feet, he took out the penlight and, pressing it hard against his watch, arched his body to prevent even such a dim light as this from being seen. It was 0133. He started the count, Brentwood having told him he must wait twenty minutes before he could go back up, and even then it would perhaps take another half hour before Brentwood was ready. But even now Dennison found his thumb impatiently slipping the safety off the Remington 7188 machine/shotgun, his left hand feeling the ventilated barrel shield beneath the waterproof plastic sheath that held the gun and its eight-shot 00 rounds. He was eager yet nervous, because along with the new rendezvous point, Brentwood had also told him that even with this quiet shotgun he didn’t want any more fuss than was necessary — that he must be able to do it with two clicks — two shots.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Northeast of lake Baikal the five hundred Siberian tanks due to roll south from Yakutsk Oblast to engage Freeman before he could build enough armored strength to capitalize on his victory at Nizhneangarsk were held back for four hours at Udokan. Clear skies were reported in the sector above which American planes ruled supreme at the outermost limit of the Siberians’ formidable AA network. But soon, invading the clear ski
es, there came threatening scuds of the storm line of cumulonimbus anvils which would soon swallow the clear sky and further engulf Nizhneangarsk to the south.
The storm, as in the case of those preceding it, was also coming down from the Arctic, blowing over the permafrost with a polar wind whose chill factor drove the thermometer in the Yakutsk Oblast to minus fifty-six degrees with the mercury still falling. It hadn’t yet plunged to the minus eighties, but it was cold enough for exposed flesh to freeze in seconds, and metal was becoming brittle.
Still, the Siberian armored division from Yakutsk had pressed south under Yesov’s orders. “You are fighting on home soil,” the marshal exhorted his men, pointing out that the Americans might have made a name for themselves in Iraq at Mediny Ridge against the Soviet-built T-72s, but that was in another world — one of sand and baked earth— and the lessons of Mediny had been learned. Also, here the advantage would be with the Siberians, for whom winter was not so much something to resist but to act in concert with, to use, so much so that the Siberians’ knowledge of snow fighting was said to be Vsosano smolokom—”bred in the bone.”
* * *
When Dick Norton heard that the Siberian armor was on the move south from Udokan, he knew that Freeman, with nowhere to retreat even if that was his style, was now in a make-or-break situation, whether he liked it or not. And every other officer on Freeman’s staff was as deeply worried as Norton, several unhesitatingly expressing their concern to Norton that this time “Fighting Freeman” might well have “bitten off more than he can chew.” With several officers using the same cliché, Norton was concerned that the growing air of uncertainty among the senior commanders would spread by that rapid process of osmosis whereby fear is borne effortlessly like a virus from the officer corps to the grunt. He knew they wouldn’t tell Freeman of their doubts — that was his job, and he was dismayed, for when the second storm struck, American planes would be yet again denied the opportunity to move effectively against the Siberian armor — this time consisting of main battle tanks moving south with formidable surface-to-air missile cover.
It wasn’t as if Freeman was unconcerned with the weather. He had all but driven Major Harvey Simmet, the HQ met officer, to distraction by calling for hourly reports. But he seemed overconfident to Norton, as if he knew as much about the terrain as the Siberians who had lived there all their lives.
“What you have to understand, Dick,” explained Freeman as he stood proudly watching his M1A1s heading north, “is their permafrost. In places it’s over a thousand feet thick. Siberians worried for years about how to get their oil and natural gas up from beneath that goddamned concrete. Buckles everything you try to drill it with. Diamond bits wear out here faster than anywhere else in the world. Then this bright spark comes along from Novosibirsk and figures out you don’t need miles and miles of piping underneath to tap the natural gas — or anything else, for that matter. Know what he does?”
Norton shook his head. It was time for what the general’s headquarter staff called “Jeopardy.” If you didn’t know the answers, Freeman took you prisoner in a ten-minute rundown on little-known minutiae.
“Well, it was costing them a fortune in piping, Dick— not just for drilling stock, but for pipe to pump the natural gas through.”
Dick Norton was finding it difficult to concentrate on what the general was saying, feeling too sleepy from the Demerol and too worried about the Siberian armor — already reported only sixty miles away. “Pipe?” he said, trying to sound interested, but imagining what would happen when the Siberians’ T-72s with the laser sights and all the lessons of the tanks’ shortcomings in the Iraqi War now known and overcome met up with the hastily assembled American defenses, only 227 American tanks having arrived on the BAM so far.
“Yes, pipe!” replied Freeman. “Don’t you see, they didn’t need it. Holes they drilled through the permafrost— vertical or horizontal — were natural aquifers. Natural pipes! Permafrost’s so thick and hard, you don’t need damn pipes. Use the permafrost.”
So, thought Norton, good for Freeman, resident U.S. expert on permafrost, but had the general thought through his battle plan to engage the Siberians with their two-to-one advantage? Worse still, Freeman had ordered his tanks to proceed north from Nizhneangarsk line abreast. Any first lieutenant knew that a well-dug-in enemy tank or AT missile battery had a much better chance to pick off tanks if they were coming at you stretched left to right rather than in line of column. And so Norton used Freeman’s homily about permafrost to alert the general, as unobtrusively as possible, to this potentially fatal tactical flaw.
Freeman, left hand on his hip, right clenched, thumb outstretched, was giving the hurry-up signal to an M-1 that had slewed off the Marsden matting that the resupply C-5s had dropped along with the howitzers also being taken north.
Freeman didn’t acknowledge that he’d heard Norton. Hands back on his hips, his collar up, eyes squinting in the first snow of the new storm, the general shook his head— not in dismay at the coming battle, but with unbridled admiration for his men. Norton could see the general was in his “attack mode,” as it was known among his officers. His holster’s metal clip was undone so that it wouldn’t freeze up and inhibit what he had, within earshot of a La Roche reporter, inadvisably called his “fast draw.” The La Roche tabloids had picked it up and gone wild with a “Cowboy General” headline, asking in the lead, “Does He Care About His Men?”—a headline that Norton had taken care the general hadn’t seen. Nevertheless, despite himself, Norton remained deeply troubled — not about whether Freeman cared about his troops, which was an insulting charge, but whether he had thought enough about the tactics of the coming battle of massed armor. Or was he simply flushed with the win at Nizhneangarsk? If the Nanking Bridge wasn’t blown, everyone on his staff knew the victory at the BAM railhead would be a strategic nonentity, a mere side blow to Yesov’s army rather than a knockout.
“You haven’t been listening, Dick!”
“General…?”
“Well, damn it, man, weren’t you at the briefing last night? All commanders?”
“Un, no, General, I was checking the situation vis-à-vis the, uh, Nanking Bridge.”
Freeman scowled. Whenever Norton had screwed up— which thank the Lord was rarely — he started this academic “vis-à-vis” bullshit, a leftover from his postgraduate days after West Point. “Vis-à-vis” really meant, “Give me time to think up a good answer.” Probably sitting on the damn can during the briefing, his good eye soaking up the “interviews” in Playboy vis-à-vis some tart’s tits, ‘bout her posing nude just so she could afford the tuition at the Sorbonne.
“Colonel — goddamn it! Don’t you slack off on me and go letting the logistical boys run line convoys through this stuff.” He meant single file through the permafrost. “Permafrost is hard as concrete, like I said, but you run a line of vehicles over it and the tire friction and exhaust spittle’ll melt the top couple of inches, and before you know it you’ll be bogged down. Like running warm water over an ice tray. Won’t melt the damn ice, but the top layer’ll go to mush, slick on you — half black ice, half mush. Armored tracks’ll be slewing and sliding like beginners’ day at the rink. Sitting ducks for the Siberians.”
“Yes, sir.” Maybe Freeman had been thinking permafrost tactics all along. Still, that didn’t change the two-to-one advantage of the Siberians.
The general’s expression had changed, his tone quiet now. “Ever tell you I met my wife at a skating rink?”
“No, General.”
“In California. Can you imagine? Middle of summer, too. High summer. God, it was beautiful, Dick. Cool. She had this kind of green stuff…”
“Costume?” said Norton.
“All green,” continued Freeman, “like the color of that water in Hawaii. Translucent, and every time she went into a spin it was — well, hell, I knew I’d marry her right mere and then.” He paused. “ ‘Course, never had much time to skate. I mean, go around with her,
you know.”
“Yes, General.” In the howling of the approaching storm, Freeman stared up at the snow, then shifted his gaze toward the last of the tank support vehicles moving out. There were too few for the M1A1s, the tanks ideally needing a maintenance check every 120 miles. But “ideally” was always somewhere else. For every fifty of his 270-plus tanks, he knew he could expect twenty to twenty-five breakdowns. Most could be fixed in the field, but all would be time-consuming. The essence of being a good soldier and a good commander, as Freeman had lectured his officers so often, was to make the best of what you had. Seize the moment rather than wait for a logistics wish list. And Norton remembered, “Never let your own fears be known to the men.”
“Dick?”
“Sir?”
“Get Harvey Simmet up here, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Once again Norton, this time apologetically, called Harvey out of his warm cubbyhole of isobar charts, SAT pics, and other meteorological data, the printout piling up in a small hill by his printer. The hourly reports demanded by Freeman had now become half-hourly, and Dick Norton didn’t take it as a good sign. In his experience, senior officers, including the best of them, often — albeit unwittingly — gave in to the temptation to switch their attention to factors they couldn’t control whenever they had a deep-seated apprehension about their own strategies. It was a form of escape.
