by Ian Slater
“Be quiet!” ordered Freeman, and turned the gun on Ilya. “Tell me about the Koreans. Quickly!”
Ilya’s hands shot up in mute surrender, the body of his dead comrade spread-eagled in the scant snowfall that had penetrated the thick branches of the fir tree like clumps of icing sugar on the dead man’s chest, his eyes wide open, his expression grotesque, as if his dentist had just asked him to open wide.
Ilya was trembling. “Believe me, Admiral, I have not much been in ABC. It is not a lie.”
“What about the Koreans, dammit?!”
“They are—” He couldn’t think of the word.
“General.” It had taken a lot of guts for the marine corporal to speak after being expressly told by Freeman not to, but the sound of the armor was getting closer.
“What?”
“Tank, sir. Getting closer. Can’t see ’em yet in the fog, but—”
“Then go find them and take them out. Do your job, man.”
“Yessir.” The corporal’s right hand circled in a “rev up” motion and the other two marines, who’d given the white overalls they’d taken from the dead Russians to two of the four fire team marines, jumped back into the Hummer, Chester telling Melissa Thomas to join them. The corporal called back to the fire team. “There’ll probably be infantry behind this fucker when we see it, so you boys be ready to give us an assist when we nose out of these trees to fire.”
“You’ve got it, Corp.”
Ilya was perspiring, babbling something, but neither Freeman nor Johnny Lee could understand him, the Russian in such a state of emotional turmoil that words wouldn’t come to him, and so he made as if he was shoveling.
“That better not be bullshit,” the general snapped without a trace of humor, never more serious in his life. “What do you mean? Trenches?”
Ilya was in a frantic charade, and he, like Freeman, had never been more serious in his life.
“Don’t try to think of the word,” Lee told Ilya. “It’ll only go farther away.” But apparently the thought of what the admiral would do to him if he didn’t make it clear only heightened the prisoner’s anxiety in his search for the English word. In desperation, he ceased his shoveling motion, and instead gave Lee the word in Russian. “Fonar.”
“Flashlight?” said Lee.
“Da!” said Ilya, making as if he was walking through a—
“Tunnel!” said Freeman.
“Da! Tunnels! Yes, Admiral. Tunnels.”
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Incoming!” warned Aussie. A tremendous crash of steel ripping into timber followed. Everyone was down for cover except Freeman, grabbing Ilya by the lapel. “Where are the tunnels? Mother of—” He remembered the vapor coming from the high ground, vapor that had no smell. Heating vents! ABC’s weapons were being made underground!
Freeman pointed his H K 9 mm sidearm down at the ground. “Down there, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Entrances?” Freeman asked next. “Johnny, ask him if there’s one entrance, two, how many? An entrance for each tunnel?”
Ilya, realizing that information was his only salvation, was now speaking at such a rate that Lee had to slow him down.
“He says that for security reasons there’s only one main entrance for all three tunnels, and this is deep under the H-block, under the administration offices.”
“Is it North Koreans who are building the tunnels?” Freeman asked.
“Da, General.” With Boris supine beside him in the snow, Ilya was suddenly a gold mine of information. The gist of what he was saying was that the North Korean Communists who, as Freeman and anyone with even a passing acquaintance with North Korea knew, had watched American air supremacy over Korea in awe during the war of 1950–53, had also realized that in future wars, the only way for industry of any kind to survive American air-power would be to do as their North Vietnamese comrades had done in Cu Chi, that is, to burrow underground, deep underground, so deep that their military garrisons and factories couldn’t be penetrated by the American bunker-busters that had laid waste to Saddam Insane’s regime. What Ilya was also explaining was that in exchange for desperately needed foreign currency, the North Koreans’ tunnelers extraordinaire had been engaged by ABC to do the dirty “hard yakka” labor, as Aussie would have called it, of burrowing deep into one of the rock spars that speared out into the marshes from the base of the nearby Zapadnyy Siniy Mountains, the deep missile assembly and storage plant located ninety feet underground and heated by harnessing the hot spring conduits that vented in and about Lake Khanka’s marshes.
The crash of artillery rounds from the creeping, rather than target-specific, barrage had now passed beyond the wood, but had the enemy armor done the same?
“Can you hear any armor?” the general asked Lee, aware that his own hearing was deficient in what he had described to Margaret as the high, birdsong “trill and squeak range.”
“No, sir,” answered Lee. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Freeman’s intuition told him something particularly troubling was afoot. Was ABC’s rebel infantry following the tank? And had they now spread out, moving stealthily through the sea of reeds toward the last radio spot? If so, this meant the Russians would have to pass by the wood before they reached the SOT farther west from which he had radioed Aussie in the wood.
For now, despite all his impatience to find the tunnels — if Ilya was telling the truth — the general knew they would have to find the tank. In the event of a second wave, a tank could destroy as many helos as it had rounds, killing a hovering Stallion with one shot from its main gun, its coaxial 12.7 mm heavy machine gun obliterating any of the troop carrier’s surviving marines.
“Damn!” said Freeman. He whipped out a small notebook from his thigh pocket and a small, flexi-grip indelible pencil that was firm enough to make a note with but not hard enough to be a deadly piece of shrapnel, as hard plastic or alloyed ballpoint pens were prone to become when their owners were hit. In Iraq, on the day Aussie had shot the bomb-belted “woman” running at him with little Blue Eyes, Aussie had seen a Brit sapper who’d lost an eye because a plastic ballpoint pen had disintegrated when he’d been nicked at chest level by a round from a terrorist’s AK-47. The plastic pen had shattered, but its “ball” had perforated the Brit’s eyeball, also taking out the optic nerve.
“Draw me a picture of the entrance,” Freeman told Ilya. “Any lie, you understand — propaganda bullshit — and you die, Ilya. Understand?”
Johnny Lee told Ilya the same thing in Russian, just to make sure.
The Russian, left hand trembling, though less now than it had been when the general had shot Boris, began drawing a diagram of the H-block building, telling Freeman that it was very cold inside it. “No warming,” Ilya told them, “so it does not show on satellites.”
“Ah,” Freeman said, “that’s why it doesn’t give off a heat signature for the satellites’ IR lens.”
“Everyone in the tunnels,” said Ilya, “wears down-filled Gore-Tex. You know Gore-Tex?”
“Everyone knows Gore-Tex,” said Freeman. “Show me something I don’t know. Show me where the tunnel entrance is.”
“Okay, Ad — General. I’m telling you truth now. No propaganda bullshit.”
“You’d better be, son, or you can join Boris.”
If the Russian thought the conversation between his captor and himself was going to produce any kind of Stockholm effect, his captor coming around to understanding why he and Boris, in the chaos of post — Cold War Russia, had thrown in their lot with ABC and helped kill innocent Americans for money, it wasn’t going to happen. There was no room in Freeman’s mind for these slaughterers of civilians. Freeman glanced through the white blobs of snow-covered bush at the wood’s perimeter out at the fog-blanketed whiteness of the reeds, anxious to see Melissa Thomas and the three other marines returning in the Hummer. Either that or the sweet-sounding swish of a TOW missile en route to enemy armor.
He glanced back down at Ilya’s drawing, showing three tunnels ninety feet below the surface accessed by elevator from the H-block. At the base of the elevator there was a large open area from which the tunnels branched and which was sealed off from the elevator shaft by large double doors. The tunnels themselves were about ten feet in diameter and six feet apart and ran parallel to one another for a distance of about three hundred feet. Thru-ways that connected the tunnels were spaced at fifty-foot intervals.
“Ask him,” Freeman told Lee impatiently, “what the arrangement is in each tunnel. What’s being made?”
Ilya, sensing the general’s agitated mood, responded quickly. He labeled the three tunnels “A, B, C,” for Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin respectively, explaining to Lee that one was for installing missile motors, the second for electronics, anti-infrared guidance, et cetera, and the third tunnel was for the installation of warheads.
“Where’s the exit?” asked Freeman.
“Entrance is also exit.”
“That’s dumb. You go ninety feet underground and the tunnels run for three hundred feet. What if there’s fire?”
“Exit still being dug by Koreans here.” Ilya pointed to the end of the three fingerlike tunnels where they converged in a fifty-foot-diameter area. “Same size as the entrance.”
“Is it finished?”
“Almost. One more month. Maybe less. There is much blasting by the Koreans but this delays assembly and our three big bosses in ABC—” He indicated the H-block he’d crudely drawn sitting ninety feet above where the tunnels began. “—They are not so interested in making exit for workers, only making more missiles to sell.”
“To sell to terrorists!” Freeman charged.
“Yes,” said Ilya, looking more chagrined than sorry. The Russian moved his map of the three tunnels around for Johnny Lee to get a better view, thus affirming his cooperative spirit.
“He’s telling us,” Lee told Freeman, “that many of the parts for the weaponry are stacked in the interconnecting tunnels, and no smoking is allowed in any of the tunnels.”
“Now,” Freeman told Ilya softly, his tone nevertheless pregnant with authority, “draw the way in through the minefield. You’ll be in the front vehicle, comrade!”
Ilya flinched, so did Freeman, as another arty battery opened up, sending more freight train rounds on their mission to kill U.S. marines. Freeman glanced at his watch. If Thomas, Kegg, and the other two marines, including the corporal, didn’t return in ten minutes, he was going to break cover and go after ABC’s armor. Unless the tank was disabled, the second helo wave, as well as his and Tibbet’s marines already on the ground, was doomed. Like so many plans he’d seen in civilian and military life, everything, as the academics at staff college sometimes said, “was in a state of flux” or, as Aussie succinctly put it, “everything was going to rat shit.”
* * *
The snow was falling even more heavily now and there was still no sign of Melissa Thomas, Kegg, the other marine, and the corporal, or enemy armor. It was as if everything had been swallowed up in what was now a full-blown blizzard, the wood as silent as a tomb, Freeman’s team and Chester’s marines statuelike in the swirling whiteness. Even the sound of the small-arms fire and the occasional scream of Russian MANPADs, which the Russians were using as ground-to-ground munitions in the absence of any discernible radar signatures in the air, were muted. Many of Colonel Tibbet’s men had still failed to link up due to the erratically spaced landings the big Stallions had been forced to make due to the Cobras’ sudden midair collision. To further discombobulate the Americans, the Russians had affixed a small, thimblesized Stuka screamer to their artillery rounds and some of their missiles, designed, as had been the Nazi prototype, to instill ice-cold terror into their potential victims. The first time he heard it, Freeman immediately recalled the stories of his great-grandfather, who had served as a liaison officer in the American International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39, about how the inhabitants of Guernica had been the first nonmilitary target in history to be flattened by the Luftwaffe, Goering’s air force, practicing on the unarmed civilians of the town as a curtain raiser to the Nazis’ blitzkrieg — lightning war — that began World War II.
The sound of a broad front battle had dropped off from the more or less sustained ripping noise of machine gun fire, guttural roars of big Triple A, and the high-pitched screaming of the heat-seeking MANPADs, to pockets of noise. These erupted spasmodically from what Freeman guessed were isolated squads of infantry and four-man fire teams, the backbone of the MEU, engaging Russian patrols and gun emplacements, all of which the snow would be covering, helping to camouflage the terrorists’ positions against the attacking marines. Those not engaged in these isolated clashes were in a physical state reminiscent of suspended animation, each marine’s body wound up like an alarm clock, the alarm due to go off at any moment, but no one knowing quite when. Every marine, as well as Freeman’s team, was praying for the arrival of the second wave, but every one of them knew it would be a hard thing for Tibbet to have to send the enciphered message to “come on down,” the old quiz shows’ phrase a current favorite of marine slang, though Melissa Thomas was more often than not the recipient of Oprah Winfrey’s ubiquitous “You go, girl!” a double-edged encouragement thrown at her as she’d struggled to stay afloat in Parris Island’s Water Facility.
While one marine and the marine corporal remained in the Hummer, Thomas and Kegg were kneeling in a natural blind of shoulder-high reeds whose formerly frost-stiffened stalks were now starting to yield to the weight of snow as pea-sized powder crystals gave way to bigger, sloppier flakes that adhered and quickly accumulated on the stalks. Melissa knew that if she and her fire-team buddy Kegg didn’t move soon, the reeds would be bent over by the weight of snow to knee height and lower, and both marines knew that the prone position, in what was now a four-to five-inch snow cover, some drifts back at the wood more than a foot deep, was not the position from which to do any useful recon. Everything in this sector, less than a mile west of the lake, had become unnervingly quiet since the as-yet-unseen tank could no longer be heard.
Marine Thomas, moving her right arm with glacial slowness, had managed to squirt a shot of “defrost” on her rifle’s long thermal-imaging Nite-Sight scope, and knew she had one of the mag’s five 7.62 mm Match Grade rounds already chambered, and the rifle’s trigger weight set for a three-instead of a five-pound pull. She knew that even in good weather a quick shot was often difficult to get off in time, and that in these near-zero-visibility conditions it would be impossible, were it not for the scope’s infrared capacity. All she needed was a heat bleed, a man’s head moving, a blurry-edged white spot against a green background. But she’d never before fired at another human being, and not from five hundred yards. In the abstract, she had no doubt, but now, here, her heart pounding under the stress, the cold, it was the same feeling she’d experienced when first she stood on the edge of the water tank on Parris Island. And choked. “Remember,” Kegg had told her as they’d alighted from the Hummer into the reeds, “the terrorist assholes we’ll be hunting will be trying to take us out before our guys can consolidate and go looking for the H-block. And, shit, it’s their home ground.”
He was right, but she reminded herself the marines had gone over the 3-D computer-generated SATPIX maps of the area ad nauseam, so that, despite the all-but-featureless expanse of the reeds here, west of the lake and less than five miles north of the railhead at Kamen Rybolov, each marine, with his GPS wristwatch, should know where he was.
Though not speaking, Melissa, Kegg, and the two others, by carefully studying their thigh-pocket charts, had estimated that they were less than two miles from the H-block, whose vague outline had shown up on SATPIX, and that the tank they had heard must have stopped, for even given the sound-suppressing quality of snow, the nails-on-chalkboard-like screech of steel treads on steel wheels should have been audible.
Then Melissa heard movement, slig
ht yet distinct, about twenty feet off at two o’clock. Was it a bird, like the one who’d spooked that guy in the reeds who in turn had triggered the anti-personnel mine? Or was it someone moving? And if so, friend or foe? Kegg heard it too, and froze, ready with his M4 5.6 mm carbine. This shortened M16, with grenade launcher attached, was more easily handled in the reeds than an M-10, and Melissa saw the tip of his trigger finger ready to either unleash a 40 mm grenade or fire a flush-out burst of 5.56 mm rounds. But the same questions dogged him: Was it a man or an animal? A mistake could cost you your life or the haunting-till-you-die agony of having initiated a blue-on-blue. Melissa wanted to raise her sniper’s rifle for a quick look through the scope, but that’d be like waving a flag, besides which even the slightest movement would cause the reeds to move. She heard a hissed, “Ga ja!” Kegg saw reeds shivering, and fired, not a profligate hosing of ammo but a marine-style burst, into the middle of the rustle. Melissa fired from the hip, seeing green-white reeds exploding in burnt-brown fragments as her heavy 7.62 mm round tore its path through the vegetation in a nanosecond. For her, however, time morphed into that strange slow motion that danger decrees, when time for those involved irrationally stands still.
Then screaming and chaos as a firefight erupted. Melissa, punched backward, saw three figures, heard, “Ga ja! Ga ja!” again, Kegg lobbing a grenade and dropping down next to her, a mad rushing like a bull charging amid the crash and flame of the grenade, and more feral screaming.
The Hummer broke cover from the shoulder-high reeds twenty yards back, the corporal driving hard into the reeds, the other marine manning the front-right-door machine gun, its red tracer cutting through the snow-bent stalks in a segmented red line ending where he’d seen the trouble, the corporal careful to steer east of the GPS vector that marked the edge of the mined moat of frozen marsh around the H-block, the latter still unseen but supposedly there, SATPIX verified.
Three terrorists were down, all dead from what Kegg could make out, but his marine training had instilled in him the caution needed when approaching a downed enemy. Terrorists, more than any other combatants marines had encountered, except perhaps for the South Seas detachment of the Japanese Army in 1941–45, were known to booby-trap their dead and themselves, lying on a grenade, pin pulled, the weight of their body holding down the spring lever. You rolled them over at your peril. Melissa found it excruciating to breathe; the impact from the terrorist’s AK-47 burst, or rather from the one shot that had hit her in the chest, although having been stopped by her flak jacket, had caused an enormous and painful welt on her left breast, the shock of the hit having penetrated deep into her chest, and, she suspected, broken a rib. But there was no way she was going to complain and become the whining bitch. If she did so, it’d be in e-mails home from Yorktown—if they got out of this mess. She could imagine the leads: “Congressman Calls for End to Female Combatants” “‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Home, Not on the Battlefield,’ Say Southern Baptist Bishops.”
