by Ian Slater
A collective groan greeted another sudden gut-plummeting drop in an air pocket, Aussie catching a glimpse out of one of the Super Stallion’s starboard windows of a white squiggle of river which he guessed must be the Kiyevka, and farther west, ragged fragments of mountain mist above woods that in parts obliterated the sliver of another river cutting through forests as thick and dark as anything he’d seen on the other side of the world at Priest Lake.
The general too had seen the black forests and detected a heightened tone of urgency rushing back from the Stallion’s cockpit into the forty or so pack-laden marines of Bravo rifle company. For a millisecond Eddie Mervyn and interpreter Johnny Lee saw what looked like a marine Harrier diving through the gray stratus, and detected an acrid smell invading the cabin.
“Hold tight!” yelled the crew chief. “Evasive action.”
“Another fucking fisherman?” said Aussie.
“More than one,” said the crew chief unsmilingly.
The Stallion was bucking and yawing violently amid a black, pock-scarred sky, the pilot battling the yoke, fighting to evade the AA fire.
“Oh, shit!” said a marine, one of the few who had a clear view through one of the square windows over the helo’s stubby portside wing. A loud ripping noise cut through the vibrating roar of the Stallion’s three engines and the deep thumping of its rotors as the helo’s gunners opened up, hot shell casings momentarily glinting golden in a sudden sunbeam that quickly disappeared into the stratus. The Stallion was on instrument flying, the copilot thanking God for the upgrade that had finally given the CH-53Es the forward-looking infrared and radar.
“Eight o’clock! Eight o’clock! AA!” The ramp’s right-side rear gunner was shouting to alert his ramp and crew-door colleagues. Aussie was able to glimpse only part of the helo’s two arcs of red tracer that were streaming earthward as they sought to silence the two anti-aircraft batteries manned by gunners who from this height looked no bigger than toys.
“More at six!” bellowed Eddie Mervyn.
“I see ’em!” acknowledged the crew-door gunner. This was followed by long, concerted bursts from the Stallion’s gunners, the interior of the “fuse,” the Stallion’s long troop cabin, filling with cough-inducing cordite fumes together with the smell of perspiring bodies, the heat having been turned way up to counteract the freezing rush of the slipstream through the open ramp and front crew door. Aussie saw Freeman talking animatedly on the radio phone and then caught sight of the Harrier, its 25 mm GAU cannon obliquely spitting devastating white fire into both AA batteries, knocking them out.
Several marines were being sick without time to grab the thick, brown paper “lunch bags” issued earlier by the crew chief. Over the noise of machine-gun fire, the rotors’ whoomp whoomp, and engines roaring, there was now a series of almost inaudible, soft, popping noises as the Stallion released its flares in hopes of drawing any anti-aircraft missiles to them rather than to the helo. Upon entering Russian airspace, everyone with the Bird Rescue armada had been worrying about SAMs, the big Russian surface-to-air missiles that had taken such a heavy toll of the B-52s and other American aircraft in ’Nam. Freeman, however, with the Priest Lake catastrophe fresh in mind, was more worried about the smaller, deadly Igla and other shoulder-fired MANPADs at this relatively low altitude. Iglas had a range of more than two miles. He was praying that the AA gunfire was all the flak that would come the helos’ way. The general checked the Super Stallion’s airspeed indicator: 167 m.p.h. With the Stallion’s engines on maximum power, they should be over the site soon, unless more AA batteries were waiting in ambush down the valley.
A marine lurched forward, his insides blown across the aisle. There was a tremendous flapping noise as ragged aluminum edging from the fist-sized hole that had been shot out of the Stallion’s starboard side trembled violently like a flag in a stiff gale. There was panic, half a dozen marines covered in entrails and blood, one of the most disgusting sights Freeman and his team had ever seen. The crew chief, though, had witnessed it before, and with astonishing agility, given the crazy gyrations of the Stallion as its pilots fought to regain control after the impact, he had produced two large khaki plastic bags, which he dumped at the feet of those covered in the blood and entrails which, moments before, had been their buddy, Private First Class James Cartwright.
“This bag,” yelled the crew chief, opening one, “has clean rags in it. The other is for the dirty rags. Got it?”
One marine, his face splattered with his dead comrade’s blood and other unidentifiable pieces of flesh and bone, couldn’t respond, his eyes frozen, his body rigid with fear. The crew chief shook him hard by the shoulder, the chief’s canvas glove immediately soaking up blood. “Hey!” shouted the chief, his right hand grabbing the marine’s chin. “You hear me, Marine?” He said it with a DI’s command voice, an undisguised call to duty, a tone born and bred daily by the corps, in the corps, for the corps. The marine answered the crew chief by assuring him that he was okay.
Freeman glimpsed a marine beside him. It was Melissa Thomas, down on her knees by the dead marine, placing a red gelatinous lump of something she picked up into the dump bag. The AA fire was already past, but no one noticed for several seconds. Freeman’s team had seen dead and dying from Southeast Asia to Iraq, but several of the marines were traumatized by the sight of one of their comrades with his entrails blasted out of him. Aussie assured the traumatized marine, “You’ll be right, mate. Hang on.” Unable to find his “lunch bag” in time, the marine was throwing up violently into his helmet. He fumbled for his canteen.
“Nah,” said Aussie, giving the marine his own sick bag and taking the man’s helmet from him. Aussie turned to the crew chief. “Got some extra water, Chief?”
“Right with you,” said the chief, and went back to his seat under which he had a four-gallon plastic drum of distilled water, which he passed to Aussie. The SpecFor man dumped the helmet’s contents into the big plastic “out” bag. The cloying stench of sick mixing with the smell of aviation exhaust was enough to make several others feel ill, including Johnny Lee and Choir. Aussie washed out the sick marine’s helmet, and gave it back to him. His name patch read “R. Kegg.”
“Listen,” Aussie lied to the grateful young marine, who looked no older than sixteen, “combat’ll be easier than this.”
The marine nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
“Anytime, mate.” Aussie could see, however, that the young marine was abnormally strung out with anxiety. “Listen, press your tongue hard up against your palate. It forces you to breathe deeply. You’ll relax.” Aussie paused. “They teach you that at Parris?”
“I wasn’t at Parris, sir,” the youngster said, almost apologetically.
“Oh,” said Aussie. “So you must live west of the ole Mississippi. “You were trained at Point Loma then?”
“Yes, sir. I’m a — I’m a ‘Hollywood Marine.’” He tried to smile.
“So, did they teach you that trick?”
“What — oh, about pressing—”
“Yeah, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, what the fuck did they teach you?” said Aussie, smiling. He turned to Melissa Thomas, who was helping to clean up the mess. “Did you learn that at Parris?”
“I’m not sure,” she answered, embarrassed by the sudden attention.
“Not sure? Hey!” Aussie yelled so loudly he startled young Kegg. “You marines! Listen up. A tip from Uncle Lewis. On long op flights, or short ones, in any sticky situation, you press your tongue hard up against your palate. You will get more oxygen. It helps, believe me!”
“Who are you?” demanded a marine.
“Grandstander!” offered another.
Aussie ignored them and winked at Melissa, who was helping him and who, unlike some of the others, understood that Aussie Lewis was only trying to boost morale, distracting them from the horror that had been visited upon them by the anti-aircraft fire.
“You’ve seen this stuff before,” Aussie told Melissa.
“I was a nurse’s helper in an ER for a while,” she replied. “Before I joined the corps.”
“Good for you, marine,” said Aussie.
Melissa returned the smile which, given the bloody circumstances aboard the Super Stallion, struck some of the marines as disrespectful at best, at worst, obscene, in the presence of the dead marine. But Melissa couldn’t help her response to Aussie; it was the first time since Parris that a man, and a renowned SpecWar warrior at that, had said something so warmly to her.
“Thank you,” she said.
“He made a pass at you?” taunted one sullen marine as Melissa returned to her seat at the rear of the helo and buckled up.
“No,” she replied. “He said something nice to me.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Hey, Thomas,” asked a marine who was nursing a SAW. “This Aussie. Isn’t he the guy who coldcocked that A-rab fanatic?”
“All A-rabs are fanatics,” proffered a mortar squad loader.
“Bullshit!” said another marine.
“Whatever he used,” said the SAW marine, “that’s him. Right? That’s Aussie Lewis?”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “That’s him.”
“My old man told me ’bout that convoy,” put in another marine. “The A-rab was belted and was using a baby as cover, tryin’ to blow up the whole fuckin’ convoy when Thomas’s boyfriend here wasted the fucker. So, technically, he didn’t coldcock him. He used a shotgun.”
“Horseshit!” argued another. “The Aussie took him out with a piece.”
“I heard the crazy bomber was a woman,” said the mortar loader.
“Whatever he used,” repeated the SAW marine, “that’s him. That’s Aussie Lewis.”
“What happened to the baby?” another marine inquired.
“Who knows?”
“Probably died,” concluded the loader. “Either that or he’s a martyr by now, ready for all those virgins.”
Melissa saw something move up forward in the semidarkness and instinctively gripped her rifle. It was the crew chief checking his watch against the speed indicator, his sudden movement unnerving her, everyone on edge. “Twenty minutes to amber,” the chief announced.
“Twenty minutes?” growled one of the SAW gunners. “Feels like we’ve been up here twenty hours.”
Choir Williams was looking pale again. The fact that he had never complained about his motion sickness was one of the things Freeman admired most about the warrior.
The general moved down the lines, chatting with the marines. It was hard physical work talking against the racket of the three engines, the rotors, and the bone-juddering vibrations that followed the AA fire. But he kept at it, exuding confidence and strength, talking casually to the troops about anything, surprising them with his grasp of detail, as when he passed Melissa Thomas, explaining to her how the end of the Cold War had spawned two Russias: On the one hand there was the affluent, technically savvy Russia, and on the other, the outmoded but still politically powerful Communist Russia. They were in fierce opposition, jockeying for who would rule in the twenty-first century. “The Russians, like us,” he pointed out, “like any sensible army, don’t go into a fight advertising who their officers are. Hell, their Spetsnaz — SpecWar troops — don’t wear any insignia at all. But you can tell who’s in charge.” The general looked at Melissa and her squad. “Anyone know how?”
“Because,” said a loader, “they’re the ones yelling at everybody.”
Freeman laughed easily. “Maybe, but the surest sign is that they’re the best dressed. Lot of them are still like the British officers in past wars. If they can afford it, they have their combat fatigues as well as full-dress uniforms made on Nevsky Prospect.”
“Where’s that, sir?”
“St. Petersburg,” said Freeman, glancing at the airspeed indicator. The Super Stallions were capable of around 170 m.p.h. but with a load of fifty marines and because fragments of the AA hit had bled off some hydraulic lines, they were down to 141 m.p.h. Even so, the warning amber light would be coming on soon. Someone asked Freeman how it was that the terrorist H-block had been missed by satellite surveillance for so long.
“It’s cold,” Melissa Thomas ventured. “Wouldn’t show up on the infrared?”
“No,” said Freeman. “Buffalo’s cold in winter too, but SATPIX’ll pick up any building in Buffalo because of all the heating vents. They show up beautifully on the IR cameras. So our best intel guess is that the terrorist tech wizards have designed a thermoslike roof shield so that the H-building shows up as a thermos, without giving us any idea of what’s inside.” The moment he said this, Douglas Freeman felt an ice-cold tremor run through him. What if the soil analyses, et cetera, were wrong, and the damn place was an empty shell, a trap? He was determined to keep the possibility to himself. His job now was to keep morale as high as possible. “So,” he told Melissa and every other marksman, which, given the marines’ standard, meant every man on the helo, “you should look for the bastards with the best-pressed battle fatigues and shoot them first. I hope you notice that I, on the other hand, am no better dressed than any of you. I’m indistinguishable from any of you, ’cept for my big mouth.” More laughter, more confidence-building after the bloody disaster that had just taken place aboard this, the marines’ second helo. Huey One, carrying Tibbet and his HQ communications group, was a half-mile ahead.
“Ten to amber!” came the crew chief’s voice. Freeman was wondering what had happened when the Harriers dove on the AA position. Had it been completely destroyed, its guns as well as its crew? Or would it be re-crewed and play havoc with the second wave? As so often happened, those in the middle of the action were the least able to discern exactly what was transpiring. He thought of Hitler again and the dark room. The Nazi Führer had been right about that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The loud “boom” that reverberated across the frozen marshlands and savannahs and through the woodland of Lake Khanka was unmistakably that of an anti-personnel mine exploding. Normally neither Abramov, Beria, nor Cherkashin would have bothered even looking up from their respective offices in the H-block, but this morning was different. With a marine expeditionary unit known to be en route to the complex, the detonation caused each general to immediately check the computer-controlled security display on his monitor. The half-mile-wide perimeter that ran around the ABC complex was mined and patrolled by Beria’s motorized rifle company’s amphibious BMPs, Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, infantry fighting vehicles. The BMPs, traveling between dug-in squads of eight men, maintained a 24/7 perimeter watch, while a mobile “Animal Squad” on standby was ready to dash out from the H-complex and replace any of the mines. There was eager competition for the night shift because deer were the most probable trespassers, and the commanding officers, for all their missile-made money, couldn’t get a steady supply of venison due to past overhunting either by the Chinese, who worked the rice fields west of the lake, or by the Russian population east of Lungwangmia.
The phone jangled on Beria’s desk, he being responsible for perimeter defense.
“Da?”
“Major Kermansky here, General. It was a Vulpes vulpes.”
Beria was gruff. “Don’t show off, Kermansky. What the hell is that?”
“A red fox, sir. Very rare nowadays.”
“Fur any good?” asked the general brusquely. Normally Beria didn’t care a fig about what animal or bird it was, but red fox was an endangered species, and a fox-fur collar would make an exciting gift for his mistress in Avdoyevka, twenty miles east of the complex. ABC had put it under curfew.
“I doubt it,” said Captain Kermansky, one of those recruited with bonus bait from the naval infantry battalion south in Vladivostok and a man who, though he had sold out to ABC, insisted on wearing his old unit’s badged beret and blue-striped T-shirt beneath his battle smock.
“Is none of it salvageable?” as
ked Beria. Kermansky could be lying, saving the prized red fur for himself.
“No, sir. Sometimes they only get a foot blown off but he was blown to hell.”
If the anti-personnel mine had blown the fox to hell, wondered Beria, how come Kermansky could tell it had been a male?
“I’ll bury it deep,” said Kermansky, as if he was doing the general a personal favor instead of doing what every man in Beria’s infantry company had been told to do in order to prevent any enviro crazy hearing about it on the bush telegraph.
But this time Beria surprised him. “Bring it to me. Maybe I can get a collar out of it.”
“But sir—”
“Bring it to me!” snapped Beria. “Or you won’t see a bonus this week.” With that, the general slammed the phone down. The call, intercepted like all other Russian or Chinese radio traffic by the operators in McCain’s cutting-edge signal exploitation space, was duly logged by the duty officer as a useless piece of information, along with all the other intercepts of nonenciphered Russian and local Chinese military traffic.
“What was that all about?” asked Landing Signals Officer Ray Lynch, bored now that McCain had launched its quad of Joint Strike Fighters, on radio silence, to catch up with the Harriers who, in response to news of the anti-aircraft fire against the Super Stallions, were now following the south bank of the Ussuri River.
