by Ian Slater
“Mr. B of ABC,” the translator reported to Lynch, “wants the coat of a red fox that blew itself up on a mine. Says he’d like a collar made from it but his comrade—” The operator paused and called back the intercept note on his monitor. “Some guy called Kermansky, sounded like an officer, he says the fox was blown to pieces. High intel, huh?”
The SES’s officer of the watch shrugged, but nevertheless reminded the translator that any ABC intercepts were to be forwarded to Freeman or Colonel Tibbet. “Maybe they can make something of it.”
“What the hell’s a dead fox gonna tell them?”
“That the perimeter’s mined,” put in Ray Lynch.
The SES team resented Lynch being in the SES. The Blue-tile Area, because of the ultrasecret status of its advanced supercomputers, was strictly off-limits to all but designated ship’s officers and the captain. Though Lynch had clearance, he had no real business there. SES called him “Lizard Lynch” because he was always lounging around in SES like a lizard in the sun and looking over their shoulders.
“Well,” the CPO countered Lynch, “General Freeman already knows the perimeter’s mined, so we don’t have to tell him that. But our SATPIX have picked up a number of heat splotches where there’s a temperature differential between undisturbed frozen ground and the ground that’s been dug for a mine. That’ll give him specific locations of mines.”
The message, sent from the surreal quiet of the Blue-tile room to the thunder of the Super Stallions, was being deciphered by the copilot, who jotted it down on his sidearm computer. He tore off the two-inch-wide printout: “A red fox has been killed. Stepped on a mine.”
“You’re joking,” said the pilot.
“No sirree. McCain’s SES is sending us a fucking intercept about a fucking fox. A red fox.”
“Oh, well, then,” said the pilot, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “A red fox. A Commie fox. This could be very important, Dave. Better give it to the crew chief right now.”
The copilot summoned the crew chief. “Big intel coup, Chief. Better tell the general. And tell our fellow marines that amber warning’ll be in five.”
“Amber in five,” acknowledged the chief, “and red fox to the general. Got it.” The crew chief read the message, shaking his head. He, Freeman, and the marines were about to deplane and the enemy knew they were coming, even if they didn’t know the precise landing zones, and here was SES wasting everyone’s time. A red fox was kaput. Big deal.
The PA crackled as Freeman took the message.
“Oh shit!” It was the copilot. “Hold on, marines. We have several blips up ahead, chopper speed, but they aren’t friendlies. Our fighter jocks should take care of ’em, but we’ll be popping flares and may have to take evasive maneuvers.”
Freeman was alarmed and tried not to show it. The blips, he assumed, were probably ABC helos coming to attack but he was confident that the Harriers and four JSFs could deal with them. The red fox, however, worried him. “Chart?” he asked his SpecOp team interpreter. Lieutenant Johnny Lee brought it up on his laptop and showed him the SATPIX’s mines, a veritable moat of explosives around ABC, each mine indicated by a tiny “x.” From the angle Freeman was looking at them, they resembled a graveyard — hundreds of crosses.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What’s up, sir?” Aussie asked the general, who didn’t hear him at first. The amber light came on. Ten minutes to green, and the air armada’s marines were gripping their weapons tightly, checking that their C-4 was safely packed, and doing deals with God. Senses were so strained that the stink of the scared soldiers, an oil drip from a leaking line, and vomit was overwhelming.
“General?” Aussie asked again.
“Damn fox,” said Freeman, his face tight with concern. “Killed on one of their mines. An SES intercept.”
Aussie’s brain was racing to keep up with Freeman, but sometimes that just wasn’t possible, given the breadth and depth of the general’s experience.
“A fox, wolf,” he told Aussie, “whatever, would never deliberately walk on a mine. They can smell anything that’s been handled by a human for months. Besides, carnivores’ve been hunted to damn near extinction, so they know better than to go anywhere near that H-block with all its odors. Which means it was well out on the perimeter.”
“Animal’d still smell it out there,” challenged Aussie.
“Yes,” conceded the general. “But there’s one thing, however, that’ll override human scent — any scent — so that even a fox with its nose to the ground’ll miss it.”
“Snow!” said Choir.
“Ten minutes to green!” shouted the crew chief.
“Snow!” said Freeman in disgust. “And we’re in NATO khaki green.”
“Shit!” said Aussie. “Must’ve fallen this morning.”
“And still falling,” said Freeman. “I’m going up to see the pilot. Bad enough we should have to try landing in snow, let alone sticking out like a whore’s tit once we deplane. Might as well paint targets on our ass.” He jabbed a finger at the laptop. “Our LZ is by a wood near this marshland. We could find cover in these woods outside the H-block perimeter.”
“Five minutes to green!” warned the crew chief. “Lock it up!” It was a new order occasioned by upgraded lock-in pins that secured the webbed shoulder and waist harnesses in the event of a hard landing.
“Maybe no snow’s fallen on the LZ,” said Aussie hopefully. “I mean maybe that was just a sick old fox. Couldn’t smell worth a damn, even though there was no snow to cover the mine?”
“Too many maybes,” said Freeman, but as he glanced down at the vastness of eastern Siberia he couldn’t see any snow, only the sheen of the lake. It was enormous. The marines heard a gut-punching thud as the hydraulics began alternately bleeding and gorging with fluid that would fully extend the helo’s huge rear ramp door. An enormous Russian sky stretched before them, but it came to an end farther west in what the SES had warned was a “significantly bruised line of L-3s,” thunderheads, stretching north to south like malevolent ships of the line. The Stallion, flying at 150 m.p.h. with a tailwind, was soon out of the mountainous and hilly country east of the lake, which they could see was completely frozen. Then they were descending over flatter, lower ground ten miles west of the lake, the land here a mere sixty-five yards above sea level, frozen but still no snow. Aussie could be right, the fox having detonated the mine not because snow had smothered the scent of it but because, quite simply, foxes, like humans, Aussie pointed out, aren’t always at the top of their game.
“Fact remains,” Freeman told Aussie, “I should have insisted on arctic white coveralls just in case.” He signaled the crew chief and asked him to check with the pilot for any sign on radar of snow clouds. The answer was that he couldn’t be sure but the line of L-3s was moving east toward them. Freeman turned his attention back to the dots — too slow for fighters, slow enough for helos — and a concomitant mass of smaller dots, as if a mass of iridescent pepper had been shaken on the screen.
“What do you think?” Freeman pressed the pilot. “Helos dropping chaff?” By “chaff” he meant strips of aluminum foil that would confuse enemy radar. In this case it would be impossible for the helos of the approaching MEU to get an accurate idea of the helo force approaching.
“That’s my guess, General,” the copilot said while feeding the larger dots on the radar screen into the computer’s memory to see whether there was a match between the radar signatures of the large dots and the known radar signatures of enemy aircraft types. The monitor’s orange-striped matchup bar was flashing the accompanying text: “Hind Mi-24,” a kind of attack helo.
“Bandit. Six miles and one o’clock.” In the Stallion’s cabin the red light was pulsing.
“Three minutes,” announced the chief. “Eight miles.” And Freeman knew that if the first wave faltered, failing either to keep the defenders inside the H-block’s perimeter or destroying the H-block itself, Moscow might summon the troops believed to be b
ased in Kamen Rybolov, nine miles south of the ABC complex, to join the rebels. For a split second, Freeman recalled Patton telling the troops of Third Army that “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” and Freeman’s 2IC, Robert Norton, saying that Russians liked to win just as much as Americans.
“It’s not snowing, sir,” the chief informed him, “but it looks like one mother of a rainstorm up ahead, another arctic blast coming in over China’s Wanda Shan Mountains.”
“Good,” said Freeman, which surprised Melissa Thomas. “Rain we can use.”
“One minute.”
“Bandit. Two miles! Evasive action.”
The radio seemed to explode in multichannel chaos, the Stallion descending, Cobra gunships and Mi-24s mixing it up. “Watch him, watch him! Lock him up, lock him up! Good kill!”
The general rose, grabbing the PA mike, grumpily brushing the flexi-cord away from his face. Melissa remembered how Kegg had told her, “The old man’s a dead ringer for George C. Scott.” She didn’t know who George C. Scott could be, but the phrase “dead ringer” bothered her, and in the midst of the din all around, she had the strangest premonition, stronger than any she’d ever had, that while Douglas Freeman might win this battle and pass into legend, it would be his last, that though victorious, he would, like Admiral Lord Nelson, die at the moment of his greatest triumph. She immediately told herself it was nothing more than a figment of her imagination, but the stark image of him falling in this, his last battle, gripped her like no other premonition ever had.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled, the big Stallion rising higher and higher, popping flares, orange blossoms in a mad rain; then the Stallion descended once more.
“Marines!” Freeman shouted, to the accompaniment of rain drumming with such intensity against the Stallion that even the general had to shout in his command voice to be heard. “You’re marines. Half fish. Remember, weather is not neutral. Use this to your advantage. Use it!” The red light was steady, ten seconds till touchdown.
In the cockpit pilot and copilot were sweating profusely. What they’d assumed to be frozen ground or marshland below was obscured by a furious rush of hail that was hitting the Stallion’s rotors and fuselage like a mad sower throwing bullets instead of grain.
“Brace!” came the pilot’s warning.
A jolt, and the off-center touchdown was of such force that against all intent, weapons flew from the hands of several marines only milliseconds before the huge helo’s front wheels took the full weight of men and matériel, the noise of the big rotors in the downpour sounding like an enormous car wash. Freeman, his team, and the forty marines of Bravo Company’s First Platoon ran down the ramp, its zebra-painted edges a blur as they deployed into waist-high reeds and a cold rush of unfamiliar odors. From somewhere on their left flank, how far away it was difficult to tell, there came the deafening noise of other rotors scything through the downpour and the sounds of battle already under way. The rain had reduced visibility to zero, the urgent throbbing and roar of Cobra gunships and marine Harriers mixing it up overhead adding to the ceaseless crackling of small-arms fire and the distinctive swoosh of air-defense missiles, heard but unseen overhead, all combining with the frantic screeching of thousands upon thousands of birds and other wildlife, creating an ear-ringing cacophony and confusion that was enough to unnerve even the most hardened veteran.
Their Stallion was lifting off for the 170-mile return journey to patch, repair, refuel, and repack for a second wave of 750 marines from Tibbet’s battalion, waiting aboard Yorktown. All of which meant it would be an hour and a half at the earliest before any reinforcements might arrive for the men deplaning and unslinging the Hummers, mortars, and other weapons that were vital to any offensive against the ABC complex.
A tremendous, ear-punching boom was followed by a huge, roiling orange-black ball of flame rising several hundred feet above them through the rain. Two Cobra gunships had collided. Their burning debris fell slowly through the downpour, momentarily illuminating a small wood on their left flank. To his dismay, Freeman saw snowy ground and ice-encrusted marsh ahead, a mass of ice-sheathed reeds looming and fleetingly turning orange in the fire’s light, the reeds, some instantly dried by the heat, rattling furiously in the explosion’s aftermath.
Beyond the marsh they could see the gray of rain and nothing more, no H-block or any other structure. The most they could hope for in that moment was that the marines of Bravo Company’s second and third platoons and the assault force’s four Stallion-ferried anti-tank Hummers and six light fast-attack vehicles had been put down close by. A quick GPS check by platoon leader Lieutenant Terry Chester confirmed that the Super Stallion had delivered his marines and the general’s SpecOps team to within a quarter mile of the LZ’s center, a prodigious feat of flying, given the atrocious weather.
“Down!” shouted Freeman upon hearing the peculiarly rushing, shuffling noise of incoming, the Russian 122 mm round exploding in the woods in a yellow crash and sending white-hot fragments singing and ripping into a small stand of trees, shrapnel whizzing into and out of the wood.
“I’m hit!” cried a marine.
“Corpsman!” shouted the platoon sergeant, but the marine medic was already there. The young marine who’d been struck in the head by wood splinters was bleeding profusely. Stunned, he sat up and looked at his M-16 with a puzzled expression. The corpsman shouted at him to keep his hands away from his face. Thick smoke almost completely obliterated the marsh directly ahead, only about sixty yards away. It looked as if swamp gas was rising until its whiteness suggested a smoke-making round had landed there.
“Keep your eyes open,” Freeman ordered unnecessarily, as everyone was straining to see, anxious to link up with fellow marines from Bravo Company on either flank, and simultaneously fearing the danger of blue on blue, what correspondents, such as Marte Price and her ilk, would call friendly fire.
“BTR, two o’clock!” yelled Aussie Lewis, crouching down by the wood, pointing at the vehicle’s presence no more than a hundred yards away. One of the most brutish of the Soviet-designed troop transports, the Bronetransporter was a huge, eight-wheeled armored personnel carrier, its two armor-lidded front eye slits, boatlike hull, sloping sides, and tortoiseshell-like top giving it the appearance of some lumbering, metallic reptile from another age. That, however, as Lieutenant Chester knew, was an illusion.
“Freeze!” he ordered. “Javelin only.”
The BTR, a type 60, Freeman thought, by the looks of it, would probably be carrying twelve troops inside, each soldier most likely armed with the new AKS-74U, a weapon that Freeman had chosen for himself. A shorter-barreled, folding-stock version of the AK-47, it was designed for easier use in the confined space that was the rear troop section. This meant the twelve Russian troops’ weapon would have a shorter range than most of the weaponry the marines carried. But he also knew the AK-74 had more whack per cartridge than most regular submachine guns.
By now, Freeman, like Chester, was wondering whether the Russians had spotted the platoon, both the general and Chester, in unconscious unison, training their binoculars on the enemy war wagon, Freeman quickly tapping the digital focus button for as sharp an image as possible through the curtain of rain. The BTR’s turret, with its heavy 14.5 mm and lighter coaxial 7.62 mm machine guns, was slewing left to right like a trap shooter unsure of which sector he should be watching.
“Amateurs,” Aussie told Freeman. “They don’t know where the hell they’re going. In panic mode — maybe here, maybe there.”
“Kegg?” called out Lieutenant Chester.
From long battle experience, Freeman’s vision, unlike that of Kegg and most of the marines, wasn’t held captive by the BTR. Instead he was scanning through a full 360 while taking care not to show himself above the reeds at the edge of the marsh that fringed this western sector of the vast lake. Mines were much less likely to be buried here because of the glutinous mud. He glimpsed a marine. It was Kegg, moving smartly forward
with the Javelin anti-tank unit. But Freeman was more interested in looking beyond at the rising clouds of steamy vapor of the kind that he’d seen rising from the hot pools of New Zealand and Yellowstone. He could smell animal excrement, which struck him as odd, given that the ground was frozen. Perhaps he had stepped in a fresh pile of it.
Adjusting his throat mike and popping the digital earpiece from the matchbox-sized collar unit into his ear, the general made contact with Lieutenant Chester. Chester’s voice sounded scratchy, the platoon commander having just inhaled a pungent odor.
“Captain, something weird going on here. That vapor up ahead. You see any hot springs on the chart pre-op?”
“No, sir. Could be swamp gas.”
“Could be,” acknowledged Freeman, “but I’ve got a gut feeling we ought to stay put.”
Chester agreed, if for no other reason than he, like Colonel Tibbet and the others now under Freeman, knew that much of the general’s legendary reputation rested upon one simple fact: He was a meticulous observer. It was something first noted by Bob Norton, his old 2IC in Third Army. Norton, in a lecture at the Army Staff College, pointed out that most women could tell you the eye color of their close friends and acquaintances. Most men could not. Freeman could. There was something about the vapor he’d seen that bothered him. There was an eruption of marines’ small-arms fire off to their left, maybe 150 yards, at what was probably the first Russian they had seen in the marshes so far. The BTR’s turret immediately slewed in the direction of the firing, the BTR itself growling, exuding a coal black plume of diesel exhaust into the rain.
“C’mon, Kegg,” Aussie hissed. “Fire the fucking thing!”
The marine was using a tree at the edge of the woods to steady the weapon. It had been only twenty, thirty seconds at the most since Lieutenant Chester had summoned Kegg, but the BTR was picking up speed across the frozen marsh where shoulder-high stalks of ice-sheathed grass were starting to bend as the rain deiced them.
