World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  Another ten seconds passed.

  “Hands on keys,” instructed Melissa.

  “Hands on keys,” came Cochrane’s confirmation.

  “Initiate on my mark,” said Melissa. “Five, four, three, two, one. Now. I’ll watch the clock.”

  “I’ve got the light,” said Shirley. “Light on. Light off.”

  “Release key,” ordered Melissa.

  “Key released.”

  Now they waited, their one-crew key-turn having initiated only one vote in the launch process. They needed another which would take the litany further. Melissa prayed it was another drill, waiting for the ILC — inhibit launch command— to be activated instead of the word/numeral/word sequence that would give them a “valid” message, taking them closer to “The First Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  “You still have a contact, Sonar?” asked Robert Brentwood.

  “No, sir. He’s still hiding in the ice scatter or he’s gone away.”

  “Very well. Angle on the bow?”

  “Sixteen degrees, sir,” answered Zeldman.

  “Very well. Contact fuse torpedo in tube one ready?”

  “Contact fuse torpedo in tube one ready, sir.”

  “Angle on the bow?”

  “Sixteen degrees, sir.”

  “Very well.” It would mean that with the sub at two hundred feet below the ice roof, the contact-fused Mark-48 torpedo, leaving it at fifty-four miles per hour, should hit the ice roof several hundred yards away at plus or minus six seconds.

  “Fire contact fish.”

  “Contact fish away.” There was only a slight tremor through the sub. In five seconds Emerson and Link turned down the volume, having no intention of being deafened for life. The explosion was loud enough, the sub trembling while the preparation for the missile firing sequence continued.

  “Torpedo room, you all ready to go?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sonar, I want you to send out active radar bursts to the surface, ahead of the ship.”

  The ping of the active mode and the hollow, almost singsong sound of the return echo could be heard by all in Control, and Emerson and Link could see the “fragged” or fragmented echoes, the middle of the arcs missing or segmented as the echo returned. It told the sonar operators that the sound from the active pulse was not returning in the middle of the band, telling them an enormous hole, hundreds of yards across, had been blown in the ice, the segmentation of the return echoes indicating that some surface ice was floating back into the hole blown out by the torpedo.

  The Roosevelt’s missile tubes were now open, water rushing in through the narrow spaces between each of the six 114,000-pound D-5 missiles and the elastomeric shock absorber liners that would help stabilize trajectory.

  “Sonar to control,” came Emerson’s voice. “Contact! Bearing two-seven-niner. Distance fifteen thousand yards. Speed thirty knots.” It was approximately nineteen miles away. Twelve minutes.

  “Con to sonar,” said Brentwood. “I hear you.” Next he called missile fire control.

  “Weapons officer here, sir.”

  “I want warheads deactivated. I say again, deactivate warhead-arming circuit. Enough gas/steam to clear interface.”

  He heard the confirmation from the weapons officer. If there was alarm in Zeldman’s or anyone else’s mind, they did not show it. Everyone was too busy.

  “Sonar, sir. Contact confirmed hostile by nature of sound. I say again, hostile!”

  Robert Brentwood didn’t hesitate. He ordered, “Firing point procedures…” convinced that it was more than likely that the hostile, whether it previously intended to or not, would now certainly fire its torpedoes within range, interpreting the sound of Roosevelt’s icebreaking torpedo as an attack upon it.

  If and when the hostile did this, Brentwood determined he would fire four of his Mark-48 wire-guided homing torpedoes at the hostile, hoping to “triangulate” him so that no matter which way he turned, Roosevelt would get him. Unless he got Roosevelt first.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  In the three SAS transports high above the cloud cover, the red “get ready” light came on.

  “Stand up!” ordered the jump masters. “Secure oxygen masks. Adjust IR.”

  Even without the infrared goggles, the troops could see flashes of light, not from the storm, which they were now well clear of, but from the man-made storm of antiaircraft missile and gunfire opening up on the lower-level diversionary F-111— fighter bomber — attack that was under way on the Likhachev Works and the factories beyond. Over Moscow itself, a rain of Allied propaganda leaflets drifted down with the flakes of snow, the people rushing out of their homes, occasionally risking the wrath of the upolnomochenny vozdushnoy okhrany— “air raid blackout wardens”—in order to collect the propaganda leaflets. These were prized by the civilian population, whose shortage of toilet paper was the most acute in years — so much so that children fought over the leaflets, not only for their families but in order to sell the letter-sized leaflets for several kopecks, many customers preferring the smooth, albeit print-covered, surface of the leaflets to the coarse nazhdachnaya bumaga—”sandpaper”—of the severely rationed Soviet-issue toilet paper.

  In the cockpit of the lead transport carrying Laylor’s Troop A, the navigator was watching the flicking green bar lines of his computer square moving closer together over the approaching drop zone. He pushed the magnifier button and the lines spread out again to the periphery of the screen. The square looked much larger now but was in fact covering the smaller area of the drop zone and taking into account wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity in order to allow the troops the best possible chance of landing, not simply in the drop zone of the Kremlin’s sixty-three acres but within the bull’s-eye of the thirty-acre triangle that formed the northernmost corner.

  On the left-hand side of the infrared screen, the copilot could see the long, brutish outline of the arsenal across from the COM, the Council of Ministers, on the eastern — right-hand— side of the screen. The partially treed and opened section, in between them, the designated drop zone. To the south lay the spires of Assumption Cathedral, the Kremlin Palace, and the Moscow River a quarter mile farther south.

  In the cockpit the navigator saw the infrared square screen closing on the rough triangular shape. “Now,” he said. The pilot acknowledged and behind the flight deck the red light went to green and the eighty SAS troopers fell, black starfish into the night.

  For all their practice, the blast of freezing air always came as a shock, the cold hitting their faces with the force of a blow, screaming about their oxygen masks, infrared goggles, and huge backpacks like a wild banshee, each man seeing the others in his troop clearly as white shapes moving against the gray smear of cloud cover ten thousand feet below, as clearly as they spotted the Ping-Pong-ball-sized blots of whitish light to the southeast as reddish-orange bomb blasts ran in strings of explosions, their sound unheard until several seconds later.

  The odds were only one in over four million, but a trooper in David Brentwood’s stick of twenty, struck in the chest by either a stray machine gun bullet or shrapnel from the air battle miles away, went limp, going into a tumble. Through Brentwood’s infrared goggles, the blood sucked out of the dead trooper looked like the spiraling vortex of a tornado. Then the wounded man’s weapon load, probably the nine-millimeter shorts, began popping off.

  David knew the sound wouldn’t be heard, as they were still too high, but if the man’s automatic altimeter-release chute controls were damaged, the chute wouldn’t snap open at four thousand feet and the man would hit the ground before any of the remaining fifty-nine troopers. David “humped” his back and went into a right-hand downward slide to catch up with him. It was a move sky divers used to form hand-holding circles, but not under the weight of a 110-plus-pound pack, and with the hard buffeting of the Arctic-born air further increased by the corrugated-road like concussions of air caused by the multiple ack
-ack explosions away to the southeast.

  David saw a white blur through his infrared goggles — another trooper moving in from the other side toward the tumbling man. The white infrared blur was broken by a black patch that David recognized was the bump of the man’s colder backpack. Now, at fifteen thousand, both men closing in on him, the wounded man’s body kept plummeting, uncontrolled, when, in a move that David right there and then knew was one of the neatest he’d ever seen, the other trooper closed against the tumbling man’s body and they became one. The next moment David Brentwood was below them, having overshot, the trooper releasing the wounded man’s emergency chute, still clinging to him. David Brentwood was swearing, the mumbled words resounding back at him inside his oxygen mask. The drill wasn’t for the trooper to pull the man’s chute but to stay with him until the four-thousand-foot level, for while there was lots of cloud cover, one chute opening before they all got to four thousand could be a sixty-second giveaway if the big chute was accidentally caught in one of the periodic searchlight sweeps from the city, the beams crisscrossing, bunching, and crisscrossing again, like enormous bunches of white celery, off to the southeast. Thank God, thought David, they would have good cloud cover to six thousand, below which the last weather report said it would be clear.

  But now, falling at over 130 feet a second, a glance at his wrist altimeter telling him he was at twelve thousand, with just under eight thousand — fifty-nine seconds — to go before all chutes would be pulled, David saw the would-be rescuer desperately trying to cut himself out of the tangle, but now falling out of starfish pattern and tumbling himself, dangling by one foot from a maze of twisted nylon. Two seconds later, David saw the wounded man’s chute “thin” to a Roman candle and lost sight of both of them. Suddenly, frighteningly, everything was black. He had a sensation of hurtling into the stark vortex of some gigantic wind tunnel, his face mask hissing under the onslaught of granular snow, stinging his face and drumming off the IR goggles like hail on a metal roof.

  Looking down for the blobs of infrared heat emission they said he should see coming up from the drop zone — particularly from the two domes on the Council of Ministers Building, the smaller one on the western side, the larger on the eastern — he saw nothing. Then suddenly, bursting out of the snow cloud, he could see the two blurred orbs and other traces of heat emission from the roofs of the Kremlin complex, though from the fuzz veiling the infrared, he could tell it was still snowing. On one hand, it would make spot-on landing difficult, even given the relatively large area between the buildings. On the other hand, the snowfall would soften the impact. The real key, however, was whether the SPETS guards would have any forewarning.

  He glanced at the altimeter needle, saw it was forty-two hundred feet, a gust of wind pushing him hard left. Quickly he corrected, going into a right-hand drop, and before he was ready for it, he heard the whiplike crack of the chute opening above him, the sudden deceleration, so that now his descent seemed to be taking forever — and he felt that the whole of Moscow must be able to see them — all about him the white blurs of starfish flipping, changing into men. There was another crack, then another — a trooper so close to him that he had thought for a second it was the crack of rifle fire. He had no idea who the two men were who had gone down in the tumble. All he could hope was that the trooper who’d gone to help had freed himself from the chute foul-up and that the other had plummeted to earth either in the trees southward in the Taynitsky Garden or into the river itself — well away from the drop zone.

  In fact, both men had come down in Red Square just to the north of St. Basil’s, not far from the red-star-topped Spasskaya, or Savior’s Gate. One of the two gate guards, hearing a snow-soft thud, moved forward, but unable to see very far in the falling snow and forbidden to leave his post, he rang for two other guards in the warming room beneath the gate’s barbican to go and investigate, suspecting it might be a piece of equipment from the snowplow now working the square. The plow’s half-slit yellow headlights were barely visible in the blackout as it worked to keep the square as clear as possible for the members of the Politburo and STAVKA for when they left the emergency meeting now under way in Premier Suzlov’s office. The plow also had to keep the square clear for the twenty or so T-90 tanks parked in the lot behind the corner arsenal tower, should they ever be needed quickly in the square — loose, unpacked snow particularly annoying to the machine gunners, who, unlike the main gunner, did not have laser sights.

  A minute later, one of the investigating guards pulled out his walkie-talkie. ‘ Parashyutisty!”—”Paratroops!”—he yelled. “Parashyutisty protivnika!”—”Enemy paratroops!” The guards at the Spasskaya Gate alerted the KGB guards officer and the commander of the arsenal SPETS troops. Thirty seconds later, 345 men were pouring out of their barracks within the arsenal, quickly donning winter battle smocks, snatching arms from the racks, the general alarm whooping at all gates, all entrances and exits to the Fortress closing — SAS already landing in the area between the arsenal on the western side and the COM, a half dozen or so running forward from the old Tsar Apartments five hundred yards south, the snow roiling in beams of searchlights that began crisscrossing the sixty-three acres like enormous headlight beams sharply defined in the frozen, snow-thick air.

  David Brentwood’s MAC 11 was already spitting flame as he, with six other troopers, who he could see were also firing, came down in the large open area between the Council of Ministers on his right and the Church of the Twelve Apostles to the south. Suddenly his face was smacked violently to the left — there was a ripping, tearing sound on his mask, a flurry of some enormous bird, its talons into his neck as he hit the ground. Before he had time to realize it had been one of the Kremlin’s goshawks, he heard a tinkle of broken glass somewhere behind him. A searchlight died. Next there was a stuttering burst of AK-47 fire, and David saw two of his troop, snow flicking up about, dead, but not before the SAS troopers from A Troop, landing on the broad, flat section of roof on the Palace of Congress, had killed four SPETS as the Russians emerged from the southern end of the arsenal, trying to make it to the trees in front of the COM. Another SPETS was shot, mistaken by a plainclothes KGB for one of the attacking Allied force.

  But if the SPETS had moved fast and were in action within seconds, as became their elite status, then so had the SAS — all expertly trained, in Olympian condition, and superbly practiced in what to do and above all how to adapt with ingenuity as well as rapidity when confronted by a plan that David Brentwood recognized was off to a bad start. The SPETS had begun engaging them, albeit in poor visibility, before a good many of the SAS were even out of harness. But against losing the edge of complete surprise, Brentwood knew his men’s adrenaline was up and racing in a way that that of men, however good, just hauled out of bed could not be.

  “Zdes!”—”Over here!”—called Aussie in one of the Russian phrases. “Zdes!” he repeated to three SPETS making heavy going of it near a wind drift of snow as they cleared the end of the park between the arsenal and the COM, Aussie pumping his forearm in the Russian infantry signal for “hurry up.” Hesitating for only a second, they turned toward him. When they were seven yards from the Australian, a flare changed night into day, but it was too late. In two quick bursts, Lewis felled them. Crouching low, running for the COM door and calling out to three members of Laylor’s A Group and Choir Williams, like himself from B Group, to cover him, Lewis quickly pushed three balls of Play-Doh plastique from his left pouch against the lock of the big door, the ten-second-delay detonator-firing unit inserted like a small matchbox in putty. The searchlights were nearly all out now, easy targets for SAS men, especially those on the Palace of Congress roof.

  “Clear!” called Aussie. Choir Williams and the three men from Laylor’s group moved quickly to the protection of alcoves on either side of the door. Now there was a veritable rain of parachute flares fired by the Russians, brilliantly illuminating the yellow sides of the COM building, the trees fifty yards or so in fro
nt of them, and beyond, the roof of the arsenal, where a parachute had wrapped itself around a chimney, the SAS trooper crouched behind the chimney, raking the trees below. The dull thump of the plastique was followed by a tremendous crash as one of the doors buckled, its falling weight ripping out its hinges as it slid down the marble stairs into the snow, black, acrid-smelling smoke pouring out of the building, rising quickly, billowing into the snowy air like some abandoned locomotive, the echoing sound of AK-47 fire erupting from inside the building. Another two SAS men, using the explosion as cover, were sprinting through the knee-deep powder now, one of them David Brentwood, who, without so much as breaking his stride, went through the snow-curtained smoke, returning fire, shooting down the two guards, not SPETS, he noticed, who had been blasting away at the door with more panic than accuracy. Probably KGB auxiliaries.

  Aussie had started to move into the building with Brentwood, but seeing a rush of six or seven SPETS, and these were not auxiliaries, dashing from the trees, he had stayed to provide covering fire for three men from Laylor’s troop who were setting up the 5.56 light machine gun, which quickly cut down two of the SPETS, three more hitting the ground behind them, another two still charging full bore when Aussie brought one of them down in the final burst of his magazine. Choir Williams felled the remaining SPETS, or at least the one still advancing as Aussie, kneeling by the fallen door, quickly slipped another magazine into the MAC’s handle housing.

  “Hey!” It was Brentwood signaling him and Choir. “No time to play in the snow, Aussie. Let’s go!”

  “Cheeky bastard!” mumbled Aussie, covering Brentwood’s left flank, Choir Williams on the right, the three of them now in the foyer, the echoing bootsteps behind them those of Thelman and Schwarzenegger. Wordlessly, with no time to be relieved at having found only two men, and these obviously not SPETS, in the foyer, the five SAS men, Brentwood leading, began heading up the red-carpeted stairway as another half dozen or so SAS, some of these Cheek-Dawson’s C Group, entered the foyer, quickly pairing off with the other three members in each of their SAS modules, several of them in Brentwood’s troop down to three-man modules already, not counting the two he’d lost in the tumble drop. There was a firecracker tempo to the increased firing that was now coming from outside among the trees across from the COM, fire returned by Laylor’s light machine-gun crews and other members of Cheek-Dawson’s sapper troop, the air outside COM’s ground floor zinging with marble chips knocked off by the small-arms fire.