by Ian Slater
“You okay?” asked Kegg, who, while he kept his eyes on the three bodies, stood up slowly, his M4’s clip-on launcher having another grenade up the spout just in case.
“Yeah,” she told him.
Kegg moved off to the right to avoid being in her line of fire. “Cover me,” he told her.
The terrorists looked dead, from head shots and grenade shrapnel, but he knew he had to be sure, feel the wrist pulse. Melissa, the fifteen pounds of her M40A1 sniper rifle feeling like a ton, covered him, the pain in her rib cage feeling like someone twisting an ice-cold knife inside, every intake of air an act of will.
There was no pulse in any of them. He wasn’t going to turn them over. Even so, he and Melissa could see they were two Caucasian terrorists and an Asian — Chinese or Korean. They reported this to the Hummer corporal whose vehicle’s roof-mounted TOW radar was sweeping the snowy expanse for the tank that had disappeared, the corporal as well as Kegg and Melissa hypothesizing that the earlier squeaking noises they’d heard had been armor retreating from a defilade position beyond the wood.
“Should search them for intel,” Melissa Thomas said, trying not to grimace with her pain, but Kegg noticed anyway and, seeing her flak jacket perforated, asked, “You bleeding?”
“No. Just a bit of indigestion. That slug winded me.”
“Damn lucky it wasn’t higher,” the Hummer corporal said. “You’d have a tracheotomy you didn’t ask for.”
She grinned manfully, asking him again, “Should we check them for intel?” She knew it was paramount in this kind of operation, especially given the minefield. SATPIX had indicated temperature differential spots where earth had been disturbed, dug up, but snow covering the ground made it difficult to pinpoint the mines while you were being shot at.
The corporal had a lariat, formed with the rope from the Hummer’s front bumper. He tossed the loop over the dead Asian. “I’ll haul him over in case he’s lying on a ‘pine cone.’”
“I like that better,” said Kegg, who wanted no part of frisking anyone lying facedown.
“Let’s get out of here,” said the other marine, manning the front-door gun. “I’ve got dots on the radar. Big ones.”
“Second wave?” asked Kegg.
“Due north,” said the Hummer’s front-door gunner, doubling as radar nerd.
“So?” pressed Kegg. “What’s the problem?”
“Problem, marine,” cut in the marine corporal, “is that our second wave would be coming from the southeast, maybe due east, not out of the north.”
“Oh,” said a disappointed Kegg as the Hummer reversed, taking up the rope’s slack at the front, the door gunner enjoining his fellow marines quietly but urgently to get aboard as he watched the radar dots grow. “Let’s get going. If they’re voodoos, we’re too exposed.”
Melissa Thomas smiled for the first time since her chat on the Stallion with Freeman. “Exposed.” Maybe, she thought, in the sense they were out on the frozen expanse of marsh, but the snow was falling so heavily, visibility was now only twenty feet at best. That was as much a defense as a hindrance.
The snow-dotted body rolled over. The Hummer advanced and reversed twice more. There was no sign of a booby trap on either of the other two bodies; the three terrorists probably hadn’t time to do anything more than get off a few rounds in the direction of Melissa and Kegg before Kegg felled them.
As the marine corporal quickly recoiled the rope, Melissa, with a great effort and the stink of the Hummer’s diesel exhaust temporarily shutting down her nose, knelt down and started frisking the Asian while Kegg and the corporal who’d finished with the rope began searching the two Caucasian terrorists.
“Bingo!” said Melissa.
The corporal and Kegg turned toward her, the Hummer’s gunner repeatedly making a 360-degree sweep, urging them to hurry up. “Let’s go! I don’t like it.”
“What’ve we got, Thomas?” the corporal asked, watching her unrolling a scroll she’d found inside the Asian’s jacket.
“Some kind of map,” Melissa answered.
“C’mon, guys!” said the gunner.
Melissa flattened it out quickly. The map was the size of a man’s handkerchief. She and Kegg glanced at it, then she rapidly rolled it up, tucking it inside her helmet against the liner. “We’ll give it to Freeman. That SpecWar guy of his — the lieutenant—”
“Lee,” said the gunner. “Yeah, Lieutenant Lee. Hey, that tank’s gotta be ’round here somewhere.”
“Relax,” the corporal told him. “You see it on the radar?”
“No,” said the gunner, “but those fuckin’ bogeys are moving in.”
“Maybe they’re UFOs!” joshed the corporal.
“You a fucking comedian?”
“How many bogeys you got, Pete?”
“Looks like nine,” the gunner answered. “Three threes.”
“What was that?” the corporal asked Melissa as they walked to the Hummer. “The printing on that guy’s map? Arabic?”
“Korean, I think,” said Melissa. “Anyway, that Lee guy’s multilingual. He should know.” She looked back at Kegg. “Might know what ‘Ga ja!’ means too.”
“Maybe it’s his grocery list,” joked Kegg.
“For cryin’ out loud,” said the machine gunner, looking anxiously over the reeds and stealing a glance at the radar. “What the fuck’s going on with you guys? Let’s go!”
A nervous rifleman on the wood’s perimeter squeezed off a three-round burst before Freeman and Aussie saw the Hummer’s whip aerial and its TOW missile housing through the falling snow. The Hummer was hit “midships,” as described by the enraged corporal who had been driving, and who was now tearing the proverbial strip off a young marine whose first live fire in combat was to hit the Hummer. Freeman kept out of it. The marine’s humiliation was punishment enough. Besides, the general, more conscious than anyone in the wood of time slipping by and the twenty-four-hour deadline bearing down on him, turned his attention to the scroll found by Melissa Thomas on the dead Asian terrorist. As the general unrolled the scroll, saw the dotted lines and elaborately styled calligraphy, he realized that the map was more or less a duplicate of Ilya’s more roughly drawn sketch. But whereas Ilya had said the entrance to and the exit from the tunnels were the same, the dead Korean’s map, his nationality confirmed by Johnny Lee’s examination of the black-inked characters, showed an exit tunnel.
“The characters written here,” Lee told Freeman, “indicate it’s a tunnel wide enough for two men.”
“How does the exit tunnel connect up to the three tunnels?” asked Freeman. He was having trouble reading the drawing overlaid with characters. “Does it go up from the fifty-foot area Ilya mentioned?”
“Yes,” confirmed Lee.
“Not a trap is it, Johnny?” pressed Freeman, brushing big, sloppy flakes of snow off the map. “I mean that dead son of a bitch Kegg and Marine Thomas wasted violated every military code, carrying around detail like that. Could it be a plant? Sucker us in?” Memories of “AMERICANS SUCK” were lit large in the general’s mind.
“No,” Lee replied confidently. “I don’t think so.” He turned to Melissa Thomas. “Was this terrorist you got the map from in Russian fatigues?”
It was a crucial question, but neither Melissa, Kegg, nor the corporal could vouch for the answer. He’d been pretty well covered in snow, and the Hummer with the rope had turned him over several times, but — maybe the two Caucasians had been dressed a little differently from the Korean, but the truth was that in the confusion and speed of the firefight none of the three marines could be certain. They’d all been looking at the dead men’s faces when the Hummer’s rope turned them over.
“I’m not sure,” said Melissa. “I’m sorry, General.”
“No problem. You did well.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Melissa. “Why’s it important about how he was dressed? The Korean, I mean?”
The general glanced over at Ilya. “Because my friend Ilya
here tells me there’ve been a lot of Koreans working up here. So if the Korean terrorist you marines took out was a civil engineer, not an army type who wouldn’t or shouldn’t carry maps of the system, that’d lend credence to this scroll you found. It’d make sense for an engineer, army or not, to have this with him. It’d be like our tac maps.” He meant the tactical maps Colonel Tibbet, himself, and selected company commanders had to have. The general paused and, as casually as he could, asked Johnny Lee, “Any date on it?” And he watched Ilya, whose eyes were avoiding the general’s with such ill-disguised purpose that Freeman became more convinced that Lee’s answer would be critical.
“Yep,” said Johnny Lee. “It’s got intended and completion dates marked near all the separate tunnel stuff.”
“Hmm,” murmured the general. While the others were looking down at the map, he was watching Ilya again. “Any date on the exit tunnel, Johnny?”
“Yep. It’s dated—” Johnny turned the map around, placing it on a stump under cover of the fir’s branches, using two H K 9 mm mags to weight it down. “His calligraphy’s ornate, flowery, but it’s not really very neat.”
They could all hear the first “wokka-wokka” and “whoop-whoop” noises of approaching helos. Russian or American, no one knew; radio silence was complete.
“It—” began Lieutenant Johnny Lee, “I mean the exit tunnel is marked as having been completed two months ago!”
“That a fact?” said Freeman urbanely, his left hand accommodating an itchy spot beneath his Fritz, his right returning his 9 mm to its holster. “Funny,” he continued, hearing the approaching din of aircraft, and looking up high through the fir’s snow-packed branches at the invisible racket thundering directly overhead. The heavy pulsing in the snow-thick air told every one of the first wave’s marines spread out higgledy-piggledy in the landing snafu that they were either being reinforced by Yorktown’s second wave or attacked by gunships.
Johnny Lee’s answer that the exit tunnel had been completed months ago was followed by such a cacophony from the helos that Freeman’s instruction to Ilya had to be delivered in his full command voice. “You were leading my men into a trap. We go in the entrance and your comrades — your comrades,” shouted Freeman, “would be in there, lights out, waiting for us. A trap, you cunning son of a bitch!”
“No, no, General,” pleaded Ilya. “I didn’t know. No—”
Freeman slung the AK-74 over his left arm, jabbing his finger at Ilya. “You told me, you terrorist son of a bitch, that there was no exit yet, that it wasn’t completed!”
Ilya’s eyes told the general he’d run out of excuses. He was asking for mercy, having prevaricated with just enough of the truth to set up the trap that would have annihilated the Americans. Suddenly Ilya lunged at Freeman, pulling the general’s KA-BAR, bringing the knife up with such speed that Freeman, putting his hand on the pistol’s grip, ready to draw, had only a split second to “up” the holster, the gun still in it, and fire, the parabellum round exiting the canvas holster and striking the Russian in the chest, punching him back. He fell, staggered to his feet, taking Freeman’s second shot in the throat. His carotid artery, punctured, gushed blood, giving Freeman time for the third shot, the 9 mm slug ending the business in a flurry of snow as the Russian fell back onto the fir’s snow-laden branches, his blood staining the clumps of virgin snow that suddenly cascaded down from the tree’s branches, a denuded branch, relieved of its burden, springing up, rising another foot or two above the ground.
Now, in addition to the headache-inducing din of the armada of helos, Freeman’s team and Chester’s marines could hear another sound, which Melissa Thomas and Kegg recognized as the loud, ripping noise of machine-gun fire. It was coming from the helos above, which were invisible except as blips on the Hummer’s radar, and identified as enemy craft by Freeman’s and Chester’s infrared friend-or-foe helmet patches. The Hummer’s helo-experienced corporal identified the craft as Black Shark Kamov 50 attack helos and Hind transporters.
The Black Sharks and Hind transports were arriving head-on with the second wave of Joint Strike Fighter — escorted Super Stallions. No one thought it was anything but a rather deliberate, tactical ploy by the air force general, Cherkashin.
“He’s a hard son of a bitch,” pronounced Kegg.
“Who?” asked the Hummer corporal. What the hell was Kegg on about? “Do you mean Freeman, or the son of a bitch who sent his choppers in to fuck up our second wave? Cher — what’s his name? Cherkov?”
“Cherkashin,” Kegg corrected him. “No, I mean Freeman’s the hard-ass. Shooting POWs like that.”
“POWs, my ass,” cut in Aussie. “They were friggin’ terrorists. They’d sell their sister for two bits. Fuckin’ mercenaries. All of ’em.”
“So?” interjected the corporal. “Who made you Pope?”
“Listen, Sonny,” Aussie shot back, “you would’ve had your sorry ass in a trap if Thomas here hadn’t found that map.”
“What makes you think we’re not in one now?” said Kegg. “Maybe the map’s a trap.”
“Hey,” put in the front-door gunner, “map’s a trap. That’s a rap.”
“They’ll wrap your ass if I’m right,” said Kegg.
The front-door gunner had no response, or if he did, he left it unsaid. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the claustrophobic throbbing in the sky.
Despite the danger presented to him by the presence of the enemy helos, as a soldier Freeman had to admire Cherkashin’s strategy. With many of the inferior Russian radars whited out by snow and therefore posing a high risk of blue on blue amongst the Russian helos, Cherkashin, like Rommel in the France of ’44, had clearly decided that he must engage the Americans — in the air, in this case — before they had a chance to land in force and link up with the first wave. Much of the surprise Cherkashin was creating with this helo attack was due to sheer luck in obtaining an “unofficial loan” of the elite helos from the Siberian Sixth Armored’s air wing located just east of Spassk-Dalni, fifteen miles east of the lake’s southeastern shore. In fact, the air battle now under way had begun north of the lake as the MEU’s second wave of Stallions tried an end run around the northwestern half of the lake, hoping to come up behind the Russians that the McCain’s SES had picked up even given the blizzard conditions over the lake. Cherkashin’s Black Shark helos, which NATO Commander Roger Hawkins had nicknamed “Werewolves,” had proved how good they were in tight turns of 3.5 Gs and dive speeds of 200 and more miles per hour with their 50T thermal imagers. The joint Russian-Israeli-built Erdogan version, with its pilot and copilot sitting in a NATO-weapons-compatible cockpit encased in 12.7 mm-proof armor plating and equipped with the world’s first operational helo rocket-assisted ejection system, was particularly deadly. One Super Stallion had already been shot down by an Erdogan’s rapid-firing 2A42 30 mm cannon, its pilot eschewing high-fragmentation rounds in favor of armor-piercing rounds. The gun’s virtuoso performance owed much to the shark-shaped helo having a coaxial rotor but no tail rotor, enabling it to perform a flat turn, its gun free to move through either an unrestricted vertical or horizontal circle as the Shark climbed and dived. With its two 2,200 horsepower, side-mounted turboshaft engines, the helo performed maneuvers that would have seemed impossible to an earlier generation of chopper pilots.
As Freeman often told his team, everything has its limitations, and the swarm of nine Black Sharks was no match for the four American vertical takeoff and landing Joint Strike Fighters led by McCain’s Chipper Armstrong. Each of the big 247-pound, 27 mm gas-operated revolver guns was so deadly that, slaved to the JSF’s avionics, it outshot the Black Sharks’ best in close air battle. And because the Americans’ radar was 87 percent more effective than that of the nine Black Sharks, the thirty American gunners in this second wave of fifteen Super Stallions were able to take their copilot’s voice feed directly from his heads-up radar display without any intermediate step, which gave them a two-to three-second advantage.
&nbs
p; Johnny Lee, listening in to radio voices in the frantic chaos and urgency of the air battle, repeatedly heard the American helos being referred to as “Freeman’s Birds.”
“Shit,” said one of Chester’s marines, “they think you’re running the show, General.”
No one contradicted him, because now that Freeman had the map, it seemed as if he was certainly the man best informed to run the show, given that Tibbet was still preoccupied trying to gather in the disparate units of the first wave.
“Johnny—” Freeman began.
“Down!” shouted Gomez, who was kneeling beside Eddie Mervyn’s rigid body when they heard a swishing sound overhead, the heat generated by the flight of the missile creating a tumbling roll of warm air that swept the wood like a prairie Chinook, sending large plops of snow falling from tree and bush.
“That was close,” said the Hummer corporal. “I thought—” He was silenced by the Hummer’s gunner, who said he thought he’d heard the squeak of a tracked vehicle several seconds before, but had since lost all trace of it in the din of more than twenty-four helos diving, hovering, landing, and all of them seemingly firing at once. Some of the errant rounds ripped into the frozen marsh and reeds skirting the lake. Freeman now heard the second wave being put down only a mile and a quarter west of the ABC complex, as planned, but over a mile north of the first wave’s scattered troops. This meant Tibbet would lose valuable time, having to hustle if he was to have his second wave join the first.
