Darpa Alpha wi-11

by Ian Slater

  “All right, all right,” answered the infantry commander. “I just left it up to Mikhail.”

  “You always do,” charged Cherkashin. “You sign off on the memos then leave the unpleasant work to everyone else.”

  “What’s got your balls in a trap, Comrade?” retorted Beria.

  Abramov’s desk phone jangled. The conversation was short, and as he hung up he rose, tightening his pistol belt, the Makarov 9 mm snug against his waist. “The Americans are starting to move, now it’s stopped snowing. So I suggest, Comrades, that you save all your piss and vinegar for them. Remember what Rommel used to say: ‘If you feel irritable, kill something.’”

  “Huh,” griped Beria. “I don’t need to be out of sorts to kill Americans, but I don’t like being accused of laziness. My battalion has always been ready to—”

  “Sergei isn’t accusing you of anything,” said Abramov. “He’s upset about El-Hage bringing the boy with him. Sergei’s a prude — either that or some Arab tried to fuck him when he was a boy. Eh, Sergei, is that it?”

  “If an Arab had tried to mess with me,” said Sergei, “I’d have strangled the bastard.”

  Quite suddenly, Abramov abandoned all levity and punched the air force general affectionately on the shoulder. “So would I, Sergei. I would do the same thing. But business is business, Comrade. Those MANPADs for El-Hage’ll bring five million. Tax free.”

  Cherkashin, somewhat mollified by the promise of five million U.S. dollars, nodded in agreement. “The thing is,” responded Cherkashin, “we don’t need a suicide bomber now that we have Freeman in a trap.”

  “Added insurance,” said Abramov.

  “Are they still at the farmhouse?” asked Cherkashin.

  “Yes,” confirmed Abramov, “outside Kamen Rybolov.”

  “That’s on the lake,” cut in Beria. “Isn’t that a bit close?”

  “K chertovoy materi! — Dammit — Viktor!” said Cherkashin. “Didn’t you read any of the memos I sent you? Yes, it’s a farmhouse, but it’s six miles from the tunnels here. The idea was to have one of the farm vehicles, a trailor rig with a white flag, approaching the American line for help. Americans are suckers for that kind of stuff.”

  “Americans suck,” said Abramov, and they all laughed at the memory of Ramon’s scroll.

  “Well,” began Beria, but couldn’t continue until he coughed out the smoke from Abramov’s Havana. “Freeman won’t suck in the morning. He’ll be dead!”

  Abramov’s tobacco-stained lower teeth were visible as his jaws closed hard on the cigar. “Dead?” he joked. “In that heat, Viktor, the bastard’ll evaporate!” With this, Abramov picked up the phone again and rang the entrance DO. “You all set with the RDX?”

  “All set, sir.”

  “Good.”

  “Ah, General Abramov?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, shouldn’t we leave right now?” asked the duty officer. “I mean, the guard party as well as production line staff?”

  Abramov was again dusting ash off his uniform. “You have the remote?”

  “Yes, sir,” the DO answered.

  “Well, then, bring it to me. Right now. Tell the guard detail you’ll be back in a half hour, unless you want to stay with them.”

  “You’ve notified the production line, General?”

  “I’ve got your bonus. If you obey orders, you can forget about your fine. And I’ll triple your bonus. If you don’t, you’ll get nothing.”

  “I’m on my way, General.”

  “Excellent.”

  Money could do anything.

  “So,” said Beria, who frequently annoyed Abramov and Cherkashin with just this expression.

  “So what?” asked Abramov, getting up and grabbing his cap from the stand, hearing the rain pelting down.

  “So this is it. The Americans are on the move.”

  “Yes, we know that, Viktor.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Indeed the Americans were moving, and quickly, Freeman telling his fire team of Aussie, Choir, Sal, Lee, and Gomez, the TOW Hummer’s three-man crew, and twelve other marines, including Melissa Thomas, that now speed was everything. Speed with “l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” The Hummer was to be their mobile missile platform. The twelve marines would form a crescent around the exit, and Freeman’s team would hit the exit itself.

  “Do we know approximately where it is, General?” Aussie had asked on their departure from the wood.

  “Approximately,” answered the general. His force was moving west southwest from the wood toward the midsection of the twelve-mile north-south rail line, between the town of Kamen Rybolov and the hamlet of Ilinka, leaving a new fire team from the advancing second wave to occupy the wood and so protect the hide of Chipper Armstrong’s Joint Strike Fighter in a natural revetment amongst fir and deadwood debris at the northwest sector of the wood. For despite the all-weather capability of the JSF, the weather would have to improve further before either Freeman or Tibbet would unleash it for close air support. Freeman intended to get so close to the enemy that even with the JSF’s state-of-the-art avionics and friend-or-foe detector, the danger of blue on blue was too acute to risk it.

  In the air beyond the wood, errant ABC artillery was coming down in unprecedented lines of fire, a nightmare of work for ABC’s gunners who, located between the H-block and the minefield, had to continually change not only the elevation but also the azimuth settings of their guns. It meant added anxiety for Freeman’s force, for, unlike a creeping barrage or a fire-for-effect barrage, there was no discernible pattern that it could plan to avoid. And out here, trudging through the marsh, where snow would soon turn to a muddy slush, the high whistle of enemy artillery rounds, whether coughed out from the T-90s’ main guns or by the big, brutish TOS, seemed much louder in the absence of the noise-dampening wood now a hundred yards behind them. Gomez, out on Freeman’s left, saw a flash, dived, but never reached the white, soggy earth before the air-delivered incendiary bomb exploded in an intense aerosol. The blast lifted him up like a rag doll before dropping him to the earth.

  “Corpsman!” bellowed Freeman, and within twenty seconds the marine medic ran fifty meters from the wood through rain and snow, Aussie Lewis using his hands to pack Gomez in snow, snuffing out the multiple globs of fire all over Gomez’s body.

  Three minutes later, Aussie rejoined Freeman’s group of nineteen — now four in his team, the Hummer’s three, and the twelve marines.

  “How’s Gomez?” Freeman asked Aussie.

  “Third-degree burns. Those fucking TOSs, fucking flamethrower bombs. Outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Fucking Russians used them against the Chechens.”

  “That was against civilians,” Freeman said. “Not combatants.”

  “Geneva Convention banned them against combatants, too,” Aussie corrected him.

  “Keep your voice down,” Freeman told him.

  “Incoming!”

  They all dropped to the snow as a full salvo, thirty of the TOS rounds, screamed upon launch, a long “shoosh” overhead, and crashed into the wood. Ironically, Gomez, helped by a medic and another marine who’d come out from the wood to meet them, was momentarily safer in the open while parts of the wood were burning.

  “I suppose,” Freeman challenged Aussie as they got to their feet and the general spat out a gob of dirty snow, “that you don’t think I should have shot those two Russians back there?”

  Aussie shrugged. For him to criticize the general would have been what his mother used to call a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The war on terror was exactly that, a war, not a here-and-there situation where you had time for a seminar on human rights. It was an ongoing every night, every day thing for these and other soldiers fighting terror around the globe.

  They walked on in the pouring rain for another fifteen minutes, each man lost in his own thoughts, until they paused before what Freeman believed, from the dead Korean’s map, would be another fifteen-minute walk
to the exit which should be recognizable by a cluster of hot air vents. “It’s hard, sometimes,” the general told Aussie, “when you’re hunting evil not to become evil yourself. Stress. We’ll all have to answer to God for that.”

  Aussie, his eyes temporarily focusing on the curtain of rain, wasn’t surprised either by the answer or by the fact that the general hadn’t sidestepped or dismissed it. It was the kind of dilemma that the general had trained all his men to examine. Here, in this cold, damp clime, Aussie recalled the hot, dry day years before in Iraq where he had been prepared on a mere hunch to take out a civilian who was running toward him, pleading, with a baby.

  Freeman and his group continued to spearhead the Hummer by fifty yards, the general preferring to place himself and the others in the snow- and now rain-veiled reeds ahead of the sound of the Hummer. The downpour was a subdued roar as it pelted down on the ant and termite mounds in the reeds and, along with the partially melting sheets of ice, flooded the indigent flora. Unless they kept moving fast, the ice would start crunching underfoot, giving their position away, despite what was now the shoulder-high cover of sodden reeds.

  Freeman, moving and thinking fast on point, realized the Russians had been particularly clever, arranging for the incoming fresh air and outgoing bad air vents to be hidden in the tall reeds of the lake and marshlands. These were the last places anyone would suspect of having three tunnels beneath them; tunnels that, from the dead Korean engineer’s info, ran for about three hundred feet back from here near the edge of the lake’s southwestern marsh to directly below ABC’s H-block. It meant that the land mines, like the one that had fatally wounded Eddie Mervyn, must have been sown from where Eddie had fallen all the way back to the H-block.

  But there were certain things that the map, the scale of which was approximate, hadn’t shown, and Freeman wondered whether or not there was any kind of security apron of mines immediately beyond the exit.

  They were now approaching the area where Eddie had tripped the mine. The general’s senses were in sync. Excited by the sounds of renewed battle all around him, he was absorbing and processing every sight, sound, and memory he could possibly monitor under the pressure of the looming deadline. Freeman’s experience and his encyclopedic knowledge of military tactics had taught him how Russians, unlike their American counterparts, were not known for building in redundancy. In the U.S. Cheyenne Mountain tunnel complex, the rock-covered redoubt of NORAD control, there was always more than one of anything in case something broke down. The Russian ruble’s collapse, after the end of the Cold War, and the frantic drive amongst Russian entrepreneurs to catch up, to make a quick buck, had, as far as Freeman saw, done nothing to reduce the no-redundancy problem. His guess therefore was that there was probably only one exit. The scale of the map that Melissa Thomas had retrieved from the Korean engineer placed the exit in an area of about a square mile, but in the hurry he and the rest of the group were in, there wouldn’t be much, if any, time to do an in-depth search, and—

  “I see it!” announced Aussie. “Vapor. Eleven o’clock, a hundred yards.”

  Freeman saw something buck violently in the tall, rain-curtained rocks beyond the two-to three-foot rise he’d felt earlier in the day before Eddie had fallen. The heat and scream of the TOS’s rounds rushed over them, exploding in the wood of Mongolian oak at the height of a man. Splintered oak, clods of sand, reeds, frozen earth, and vegetation cascaded around them, frozen lumps of ice-veined marsh mud striking Aussie’s and Melissa Thomas’s helmets.

  The big forty-two-ton TOS-1 bucked again, the Hummer’s tires churning up reeds, ice, and sand as it veered wildly left and right to avoid being hit. A TOS round — they were usually fired at distances of under four hundred yards — missed the Hummer again, this time ripping open a nearby colony of man-sized ant nests with such force that the concussion swept into the group with the strength of a kick in the back. The shock had put young Melissa Thomas into a dangerous comatose condition that, without immediate access to state-of-the-art MASH equipment, could result in her slipping into deep coma.

  “Mark that vent!” Freeman shouted, but most couldn’t see it. Freeman pointed immediately right and ducked. “Down!”

  The Hummer’s TOW missile, its control vanes and wires silver streaks through the rain, had hit the TOS, causing it to buck again. But this time it wasn’t moving from the recoil of firing another 222 mm thermobaric warhead but flying apart, its metal fragments bansheeing through the rain-slashed air, the marine fire team and the remainder of the group scrambling for protection behind anthill, tree stump, anything nearby. The fragments from the TOS rained down over the minefield, setting off a score of anti-personnel mines to the right, where Freeman had been pointing when the Hummer’s corporal had gotten the big, lumbering TOS in his sights.

  As the shower of debris diminished, Freeman again shouted, “Find that vent. Move!” While his men spread out, Freeman called out to Aussie, “Give me a hand here.” The general was kneeling by the unconscious Thomas; she had no pulse. “Help me drag her to that ant pile.” Aussie did as he was told, but wondered why bother wasting time trying to get the young marine to the shelter of a damned ant heap.

  “Found it!” It was young Kegg. He meant the outlet vents, not the exit itself. “They’re using tree stumps to house the air vents. Looks like three, no, four of ’em. They’re all grated and elbowed like a sink to stop leaves and crap falling in.”

  Freeman called out to Sal. “You, Johnny, and Choir see if you can find the exit opening in this snow. It’ll probably be flush to the earth, maybe a trapdoor in that high hump. I don’t think it’ll be mined, but watch your step.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sal, shooting a quick glance at Aussie and at the prostrate marine. “Think she’ll be okay?”

  “We’ll see,” said Freeman, quickly tearing off her flak jacket and ripping open her khaki shirt. “Bandage her eyes quickly!” he told Aussie, as Sal ran off, Kegg and the fire team forming a defense perimeter after tagging the four tree stumps that contained the tin housings that were shaped like the number 7. Two were intakes, two outlets, the shoulder-high reeds hiding them, but condensation was clearly visible where the warmer vented air met the icy Arctic air.

  “Hurry up, Aussie!”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Aussie, quickly using his own field bandage to blindfold the comatose Thomas, “is that the rumor in the group is that you told Colonel Tibbet in your message to him that we’re going to attack the entrance to the tunnels, not the exit?”

  “I know,” said the general, and nothing more.

  The moment Aussie had finished blindfolding Melissa, Freeman grabbed the marine’s ankles and dragged her onto the ant heap. The insects immediately swarmed over the invader’s chest, face, and body.

  “What in hell—” began Aussie, but before he could get out the next word, Thomas’s body was in spasm, her heart given the jolt it needed — not an invasive jolt of electricity but a collective jolt of poison from the hundreds of ant bites, shocking her heart back into action via her body’s adrenaline response.

  “Shit!” said Aussie, seeing her twitching, coming back to life. “You’re a fucking genius, General.”

  “I’d argue if I could, Aussie,” said Freeman, dragging Melissa, who was now screaming with pain, away from the insects. “Quiet!” he told her as she struggled to stand up, fell back, then succeeded with his help. “We’re taking off the blindfold, Melissa. Didn’t want those ants to get at your eyes.”

  “Ants — what — I—”

  “Be quiet,” Freeman told her sternly as she collapsed again. “You’ll wake up the neighborhood,” a comment that added to Aussie Lewis’s awe at what he’d just seen on this battlefield. If I survive, he promised himself, I’ll never forget this, ever.

  Freeman jabbed her with a one-time morphine syringe, and pushed out a small oval pink pill from his first-aid blister pack. “Benadryl. This’ll help. Make you a bit dozy, but not too much.”

&
nbsp; Again, Melissa was trying, very unsteadily, to get on her feet, but the effect of the TOS round’s concussion was still evident in her wobbly walk as Aussie, hustling as much as he dared, led her over to the high brush-and reed-covered ground where wisps of vapor could be seen bleeding from the marsh and which Kegg and another in his fire team suspected of housing the exit door.

  On closer examination, Kegg saw there were other large, circular bumps of snow, rocks sticking through, the lake now turning a chafflike brown color, the glistening ice tent that had formerly sheathed them now melting in the downpour that was sending the ants into a further frenzy as they sought to repair the earthquake that had assaulted them in the blast from the explosion of the 222 mm missile and Thomas’s sudden appearance in their midst.

  “We’ll have you medevaced ASAP,” Freeman assured Melissa. “Soon as we get this tunnel business wrapped up.”

  Aussie handed Thomas her M40A1 rifle. “Can you still use this?” He had to repeat it in the din.

  “You kidding?” said Melissa, mistaking genuine concern as criticism of the only female marine combatant in Yorktown’s Marine Expeditionary Unit.

  Beneath the superbly camouflaged net roof of ABC’s tank park near the H-block, General Abramov, with Cherkashin nearby, was issuing last-minute instructions to his Siberian Sixth’s second in command, Colonel Nureyev, a short, tough, thickset man whom his tank crews called “The Dancer,” in deliberate contrast to the great, nimble-footed Nureyev of ballet fame, and stressing to all his Siberian Sixth tank captains that, except for a few main battle tanks that had been given weapons-free status and sent out to harass the American flanks, most of the T-90s must be held back. These would be ready to surge around and into the main American force that Abramov was certain would soon launch an attack against the H-block. But no sooner had he explained the situation to the Siberian Sixth, than Abramov saw at least two platoons of Beria’s Naval Infantry company moving through the safe channels in the minefield before turning south toward the exit area about a mile from Freeman’s force.