by Ian Slater
Most of the SAS had now taken off their IR goggles, not so much because they were a dead giveaway for any SPETS who got close enough to see them through the almost zero visibility of the falling snow but rather because, while they indubitably conferred an advantage during the landing and had cost twenty-three SPETS their lives before they got more than ten feet beyond the arsenal entrance, the peripheral vision of the goggles was a hindrance on the ground and indeed could reflect and so draw fire beneath the intensely bright light of the flares.
“Sapper mod!” called out David.
“Here!” came an answer. “But there’re only two of us, Lieutenant.”
“Never mind,” said David. “Do it!”
Within two minutes they had found the COM’s main switchboard. Seven seconds later, the entire building was in darkness. David heard the whine of an elevator stopping abruptly. Outside, SPETS fire was increasing. In a way, it was reassuring — the T-90s had not yet entered the complex, the Russian commandos no doubt confident that three SPETS companies could easily deal with the SAS. Besides which, the tanks, whose brutish shapes David had glimpsed before touching down, couldn’t do much at the moment — any cannon fire into the east wing as likely to kill Suzlov and his war cabinet as the SAS.
Moving quickly but cautiously up the staircase, David could smell the surprisingly heavy, musty smell of the huge Old World building, and for some inexplicable reason, it gave him a surge of confidence as he, Aussie, Thelman, Schwarzenegger, and Choir Williams moved from the second-floor level toward the third-floor staircase without opposition, the ubiquitous four-globed chandeliers along the hallways lifeless now, the main switchboard had been taken out in the same power cutoff that would prevent the war council from using the elevators. Some chandeliers began to shake, their crystals casting crazy-patterned shadows in the dim, brooding light of the emergency battery packs that had come on at the end of each of the long, narrow, red-carpeted hallways. David’s target, which he could see clearly in his mind’s eye, was on the third floor of the east wing. There, another hallway leading from the wing’s hub would take him to Suzlov’s office to the meeting where, as Allied intelligence told them, the decision would be made that could lead to a chemical/nuclear holocaust not only for NATO’s forces but for all its noncombatants as well.
Brentwood glimpsed other SAS, a dozen or so, from Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop totally ignoring Brentwood’s troopers as they quickly went about their business, three men in each SAS module hurrying to place their charges on the Irish “J” beams and other supports, the fourth member of each module providing covering fire. The detonators were set for twenty minutes.
Outside, they could hear the chattering of an M-60 7.62-millimeter machine gun from one of Laylor’s A Troop mobile fire parties who were holding off the SPETS while Brentwood’s B Troop and Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop kept moving up the COM stairwell. David heard a series of steady muffled thumps in the background: two of the SAS’s lightweight 60.7-millimeter Esperanza commando mortars, which, as well as laying down several 1.43-kilogram smoke rounds in and about the arsenal, were also firing 1.4-kilogram high-explosive bombs with a fifty-meter damage radius. It was one slight edge that the SAS enjoyed, the SPETS understandably unwilling to lay mortar fire on their bosses in the COM.
Approaching the third floor, Schwarzenegger, Aussie Lewis, Thelman, and Choir Williams behind him, David heard the scream of an SAS man hit somewhere behind them, but not for one second did David look back. Suzlov’s office was all he cared about — number six on the right side of the third floor’s east wing, the mockup in the Hereford house as vivid to him as the first time they’d run through it. It was a long room, four or five times the size of a Western executive’s office, with a highly polished light wooden floor, dark wood desk, and grape-red Persian carpets. To the right of the desk and its neat row of four ivory phones there would be high, scalloped and ruffled white curtains. Behind the desk, a Communist flag and a fifteen-foot-high beige panel between the window and the far door — a door that might connect to the next room. And above the door he would see the burnished brass emblem of the Soviet Union and, though it should be out by now, a large, multifaceted chandelier below which Suzlov and his “merry band,” as Cheek-Dawson was wont to call them, would now be clustered behind elements of the elite guard, on station during Politburo/STAVKA meetings.
David heard a bumping, like a heavy ball, somewhere on the stairs above him. “Grenade!” he shouted, dropping to the stairs, firing the MAC into the darkness, the grenade’s explosion a crimson flash, its shrapnel taking out a window and zinging against the high walls. In the light of the grenade he saw two figures above him and fired. They both dropped. His group, having paused for only a split second, was virtually untouched by the grenade as it bumped past them, exploding on the second-floor level.
At the top of the stairs David saw one of the four-bulb chandeliers reflecting light from an emergency battery lantern. He gave the lantern a burst and there was no light. He knelt to put in another clip — suddenly a door flew open along the hallway. David flattened, Thelman shot dead, taking the full impact of the SPETS’ burst, which now stopped, snuffed out by Aussie’s return fire. Schwarzenegger bent down by Thelman.
“Leave him!” shouted Brentwood. “Keep moving.” He waved Aussie, Schwarzenegger, Choir, and another man, from B Group, forward. From outside came the approaching rotor slap of a Hind chopper, either bringing in reinforcements or possibly trying for a rooftop evacuation of Suzlov and his crew. The fire from the SPETS told Brentwood he wouldn’t have time to play safe and clean out each room, but that they’d have to run a possible gauntlet straight through Suzlov’s office. He was also wondering whether Laylor’s troop had managed to fight off the determined SPETS attempt to break through the cordon of fire with which Laylor had secured the COM’s northern entrance.
There was an enormous explosion, a shattering of glass, and a gust of desert-hot air, the Hind E disintegrating above the COM, sending down a golden liquid rain of gasoline and huge charred segments of what had been the chopper’s engines falling down the side of the building, Laylor’s M-60 machine guns now in a steady rip, their gunners using the light of the burning chopper to better rake the shapes that tried to make it from the old cannons and trees that flanked the arsenal across from the COM in what was now knee-high snow.
“Watch for more grenades!” Brentwood cautioned as his party split either side of the corridor that led to Suzlov’s office about sixty feet away. The cacophony of sound was so deafening outside as Laylor’s fire teams kept changing their position and the SPETS counteroffensive grew that Brentwood had to shout to be heard as he prepared them for the rush. Quite suddenly he realized he hadn’t had time to be frightened.
Because of the noise, he didn’t hear the sound of the opening door, second down on the left, but the light from the chopper lit up the SPETS the moment he’d opened the door to get his line of fire. Schwarzenegger’s burst literally punched the Russian back into the room. They heard a high, terrified “Please!” and saw some kind of cloth being waved from the second office, and then, hands high above them, one woman in uniform, the other a civilian in a yellow dress, came scuttling out. David cursed, ordered Aussie and Williams to frisk and “tape” them. It was thirty seconds lost, but for a fraction of a second in that time, Brentwood’s action delineated the fundamental difference between the two elite forces joined in battle. It was a microcosm, he realized, of what they were fighting about— about how the trainload of nurses and women like Lili and wounded men would be treated by one country as opposed to another. God knew the SAS were no angels, but David knew from bitter experience that a SPETS team would have simply blown the two women away.
He glanced at his watch. They had been in the COM seven minutes. They’d have to be out in another fifteen minutes, allowing three minutes at least to get well clear of the massive building before C Troop’s charges blew. But there was no point in the building coming down until they could conf
irm that Suzlov and friends had been dealt with.
“Suzlov’s office,” he reminded the group, “sixth on the right.” Suddenly the silence of the building was deafening, and for a moment all he could hear was the ringing in his ears caused by the fierce battle still raging outside, and through one of the shattered west windows he glimpsed small, dark figures of SAS men, four or five of them, who had landed on the Palace of Congress, three still pouring down deadly fire into the arsenal, one crumpled, writhing in the snow. To his right, David could hear the creaking of tanks in Red Square beyond the Kremlin’s east wall as more man twenty or so T-90s positioned their 135-millimeter cannons and 12.70 machine guns for the maximum enfilade of fire, all the way from the Historical Museum at the top of the square down past St. Nicholas’s Tower Gate to the island that was St. Basil’s outside the walls, the variegated hues of the church’s onion domes flickering in the light of the SPETS’ flares. No doubt the entire Kremlin was surrounded now by armor. The cannons had laser-guided fire control, but aiming, David knew, would hardly be a problem for the Russian gunners. It would all be point-blank. If a 135-millimeter hit you, as Aussie had once told Williams in a cheery aside, there’d be nothing left to identify, the hydraulic punch and superheated shell exploding blood and bone, in effect cremating you on the spot.
As Schwarzenegger quickly finished frisking and taping the two women, the other man from Troop B joined him in covering Brentwood, who was now moving along the right wall of the corridor, quickly ducking across into what had been the office of the two secretaries to make sure it was clear before moving farther down the hall. As he did so, Schwarzenegger pushed the two secretaries back inside the office and moved ahead of Brentwood, taking the left-hand side of the hallway, followed by the new man from Troop B, with Choir Williams behind.
Williams, taking up the rear, could hear a squeaky sound, like unoiled carts. It was the sound of more tanks wheeling into position in the vast square. Choir realized that refusing to take up Aussie’s bet about how many SAS would get out after the mission had probably been one of the better decisions of his life. Not that he’d get to spend what he’d saved.
David glanced back, seeing that Schwarzenegger, the new man from B Troop, and Williams were right behind him.
“Fritz,” he whispered, motioning to the new man and Williams behind, “you three go forward. Aussie and I’ll take rooms three and four, with you covering from halfway down.” He indicated the two offices on the right, which, unlike the two on the left, still had their doors shut and so were unknown quantities. “Everybody joins for the party at number six. Got it? No grenades until six. Don’t waste time on the doors. Automatic fire. Keep ‘em or kill them inside. We haven’t got time for housecleaning. Aussie and I’ll zip open six. You two as backup. Ready?”
“Ja,” said Schwarzenegger, he and the new man moving forward, Williams as tail gun Charlie. Making no attempt on three and four until they had covered Schwarzenegger and Co.’s advance along the left side, Brentwood and Aussie waited till Schwarzenegger was halfway down, away from any direct line of fire from the two closed offices, before they opened up with angle fire, their nine-millimeters chopping through the Party’s utilitarian plywood doors that had been used to segment the older, huger rooms of the tsar. Schwarzenegger and Williams were already “renovating” the third office on the left, just to make sure, but no one was in it. Coming out as quickly as they’d gone in, Schwarzenegger, the B trooper, and Williams moved farther down the hallway.
The explosion was like a whoof of gasoline, the hallway engulfed in smoke, Schwarzenegger’s legs hitting the roof, falling amid the debris, the blood from his severed thighs spurting from them like hoses, the smell of his burned flesh mixing with the stringent afterfumes of the Astrolite, the liquid mine which, sprayed onto the ground or in this case on the red hall carpet, had been detonated by foot pressure. Schwarzenegger was still alive, barely — a grotesque dwarf slithering in his own blood and intestines that were oozing out of him. The moment the Astrolite — a mine of American invention which the SAS did not know the Russians possessed — had exploded, the door of the office before number six was flung open. Three SPETS, so big they completely blocked the hallway, stepped out and fired. But Aussie, with the long SAS hours of “nondistraction” training, had resisted the natural temptation to immediately look down at his wounded comrades and instead had gone for the target with a full burst — its backwash searing the hairs on his hands — the burst cutting down the three SPETS. The man who had been immediately behind Schwarzenegger, miraculously saved from the blast because of Schwarzenegger’s taking the full impact of the mine, was now reeling back, already dead from one of the Russians’ shots, the bullet having passed clean through him, clipping Choir Williams on the shoulder.
“Into the rooms!” Brentwood yelled back to Aussie as he fired a long burst to dissuade any more SPETS from coming out of number six as a blur of two or three of Cheek-Dawson’s C Troop, having come up from the second level, now joined Lewis and Williams in the last office before number six.
“Bloody carpet was mined,” David heard the Australian yelling out at more members of Troop C who were now reaching them from the second floor and about to run down the hallway. “Stay where you are!” Aussie warned. “Fucking carpet’s pressure-triggered.”
His MAC in his right hand as he backed into the cleaned-out office now occupied by the Australian, Choir Williams, and the other men from Troop C, David, not putting down the MAC for a second and still watching the hall, reached across with his left hand, pulled out his Browning pistol from its holster, and shot what remained of Schwarzenegger through the heart.
“Let’s go for six!” shouted Aussie. “One or two of us’ll—”
“Negative!” said Brentwood. In Pyongyang some of Freeman’s troops had found connecting doors between several of the offices in Mansudae Hall, and the NKA regulars had used the connecting doors to backtrack through the offices and bushwhack Americans in the hallways from behind. David decided that, given the short time remaining and the further delay any Astrolite explosion would cause, there was only one way — but he had to raise his voice loud enough to be heard over the battery fire alarms that were now screaming all through the hallway, their beams boiling with toxic smoke. Suddenly another fire alarm started screaming above them in the office. “Fish is done!” said Aussie — but no one laughed, all of them knowing they only had at most five minutes to do the job and get out of COM — one man, visibly in shock, shaking violently, unable to look at Schwarzenegger’s remains.
“All right!” said David. “We haven’t got time for musical chairs. C troopers — plastique! On the far wall — five of diamonds. If we start taking fire through the wall, hit the deck. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right! Go!” By this time, several more troopers from C Group had entered the room.
“Fucking traffic jam,” said Aussie grimly.
“Ten-second delay!” David called out to the sappers, placing the charges in a three-foot square, the fifth lump of plastique in the middle, the detonator wires connecting. The sappers turned, signaling to one of their colleagues, who ran forward with another khaki vest load.
“Feels like brick,” the sapper nearest the wall said quietly, quickly packing double the amount of plastique into the square.
“Blow us into the fucking river!” said Aussie, standing next to Brentwood ten feet back from the wall, their MACs at the ready, the newly arrived troopers from Group C making a line of seven SAS ready to charge through to number six the moment the wall blew — if it did.
“How many in all?” asked one of the troopers. “Besides Suzlov, I mean.”
“Twenty-nine,” said Brentwood. “Don’t sweat it. There’ll be plenty of targets.”
“Plus SPETS,” added Aussie. “They’re the pricks I want.”
“Calm down,” Brentwood cautioned him. “Can’t help ‘em now, Aussie.”
The Australian said nothing, kno
wing that Brentwood meant Schwarzenegger, Thelma, and the others with whom they’d shared the indissoluble bonds of the SAS.
“All set!” announced the corporal who’d directed setting the charges.
“Behind the desk!” ordered Brentwood, but there was no need. The long desk of dark, highly polished hardwood that reflected the flares streaking up from the tank columns outside was over on its side in seconds, the SAS men down behind it, chin straps undone lest the concussion lift their Kevlar helmets.
“On safety!” ordered Brentwood — a precautionary order against accidental discharge from weapons hit by falling debris. “Aussie, you—”
The room blurred, the sound like a cracking iceberg, an avalanche of plaster falling on them, the snap of one man’s collarbone distinctly heard, followed by the shattering of the long room’s chandelier, its fragments lacerating the portraits of Lenin, the Politburo, and KGB chief Chernko into thousands of pieces.
“Go!” shouted Brentwood, and within seconds after the blast, the line of seven SAS moved into the choking fog of dust, MACs erupting in an enfilade of orange-tongued fire, none of them knowing whether the wall had in fact been penetrated but taking no chances. As they ceased firing, their bodies still tense as compressed springs, they moved forward over the rubble.
Brentwood had prayed that a hole at least the size of the three-foot-wide pattern would allow them an attack point. In fact, almost the entire brick wall had disappeared, a great gaping hole appearing in the eerie light afforded by the burning Soviet flag behind the desk, a pile of rubble looking like the steaming remains of an earthquake. Then David Brentwood saw three shadows, a sparkle of light — the fire from AK-47s — before them. It was a brave attempt, but the three SPETS, with the loss of one of the C troopers, were dissected by the hail of SAS bullets. Then quite suddenly all was deathly quiet, except for the low moans of the SAS trooper whose broken collarbone made it impossible for him to move, two other troopers coming into the room, dragging him out after one of them had given him a shot of morphine in order to get him downstairs and out of the building as soon as possible.
