by Ian Slater
“What’s the point?” Abramov thundered at Beria, who was standing in his infantry command car. Abramov was incredulous. “You should have kept your men back here, Beria. Didn’t you read the intercept between Freeman and Tibbet that I decoded? Why are you committing your best infantry over there on the lake side near the exit? Dammit, didn’t you read the message? Freeman is only using the attack on the exit as a diversionary tactic, when all the time he and Tibbet plan to hit us here at the H-block, the entrance to the tunnels. So, I’m asking you, Viktor, why are you bothering to commit your crack naval infantry to the damned exit?”
“Because I have read your decode. What’s more, I’ve re-read and re-read it and now I think that maybe Freeman is trying to pull a fast one. I think he intends to make the main attack through the exit.”
“How do you possibly come to that conclusion? You think I’m an idiot? You think I’ve decoded the message incorrectly?”
“No,” answered Beria. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your decoding, but that you haven’t understood what Freeman means.”
“I’ve misunderstood, you say? What it tells me, Viktor — and, I might add, what it tells Cherkashin — is that we need everybody here, particularly crack troops like yours, to guard headquarters and the computer. The whole thrust of Freeman’s message — if you’d read it carefully—is that he intends to attack the entrance. Freeman knows, and he’s right, that if he destroys us and the computer here at headquarters, the Americans have won. Lathes — all the engineering stuff in the tunnels — can be replaced, but if the DARPA ALPHA information, is destroyed, then we’re finished. My propali! Kaput! Didn’t you read the decode, or what?”
Beria was stunned. What the hell was Abramov ranting about, asking him ad nauseam whether he understood the intercepted message between Freeman and Tibbet?
“Da,” Beria said, employing the sullen tone of a disrespectful peasant, staring angrily at Abramov and his big-prick cigar. “Yes, Comrade General, I saw your fucking decode, but you’re so cocksure of yourself, Mikhail, you’re not seeing what the hell is happening, are you?” Beria paused, using his revolver hand to angrily wave away the thick, bluish gray smoke, the Havana’s stink mixing with the choking fumes of Abramov’s twenty massed main battle tanks. “Aren’t you watching Freeman’s troops over there through your binoculars? If you ask me, they’re more than a diversionary force. They’re marines from the American fleet. They’re tough bastards.”
“Huh,” said Abramov dismissively. “You’re seeing what you want to believe.”
Beria looked hard at Abramov. With the sounds of battle growing closer, he reached inside his battle tunic, pulled out his copy of Abramov’s decoded intercept, and quickly read it aloud, then asked Abramov, “The reference to this Peter Rose?”
“Yes, I saw it,” said Abramov. “It’s probably a good-luck phrase the Americans use in the same way that we—”
“Do you know who Pete Rose is?” Beria pressed, breaking open his pistol. It was always the last check he made before going into action, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot for good luck.
“No,” Abramov answered testily, “I don’t know who he is and, as I said, it doesn’t matter. A go-code or an operational name can be anything. Operation ‘Bird Rescue,’ for example.”
Beria, seeing that each chamber was loaded, snapped the revolver shut. “You see no other significance in the name?”
“No.”
Beria, slipping the revolver into his holster, asked Cherkashin the same question.
“No,” answered Cherkashin, who, up to this point, had been ignoring the argument, poring instead over his pilot’s tactical charts and the meteorological reports, which called for more heavy rain.
“Rose,” said Beria, “was an American baseball player. Famous.”
Neither the air force general nor Abramov showed much interest.
“I don’t follow sports,” said Abramov, with an air of condescension, as a wine snob might address a beer drinker, after which he took obvious satisfaction, as commander of the Sixth Siberian Armored as well as overall garrison commander, in ordering that the bulk of ABC’s forces, at least three-quarters of all personnel, were to secure H-block. His tanks would form a ring of steel around it so that the assault force, which the American was no doubt assembling with a fresh infusion of marines from the second wave, would not be met by a skeleton ABC force as Freeman would no doubt have it, but instead would be annihilated. And if the guards in the tunnels could not hold, the duty officer need only press a button and the RDX would vaporize the enemy in the tunnels — as well as many of ABC’s soldiers. But Abramov knew that such “collateral damage” could always be replaced by ABC’s danger bonuses. Russia was full of desperate men without work, soldiers without work.
“Pete Rose,” Beria continued, “was disgraced and never made baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown because he had been caught betting on baseball games. I think mention of him by Freeman is to tell Tibbet that everything in the message is exactly the opposite of what Freeman intends to do.”
“You’re crazy,” said Abramov. “You’ve been reading too much American press. It’s full of lies.”
Beria ignored the remark and continued calmly, “During World War II, when English-speaking Japanese pilots tried to pass themselves off on radio as Americans, the American pilots, if suspicious, used to ask questions, the answers to which were common knowledge to born-and-bred Americans. If the American pilots didn’t get the right responses, they knew there was a spy amongst them. And if you’ve bothered to read Freeman’s file — indeed, if you know anything about Freeman — you’ll know he has an encyclopedic mind about things military, and it’s exactly the kind of trickery and wartime practice that he’d know about.”
Abramov opened his hands, like a holy man, in the universal gesture of conciliation. “I tell you, Viktor, this Pete Rose thing is nothing. The phrase is probably merely a decryption identification key for their intercomputer traffic. You’re being paranoid, Viktor. Now recall your infantry.”
Before Beria could respond, Cherkashin added, “Mikhail’s right, Viktor. You’re making too much of this. We’re all on edge. But you have to recall your naval platoons because we’ll need them here. We’ll finish the Americans off together, eh?”
It was two against one, so Beria compromised. He recalled two of the four platoons — eighty of the best, and now most highly paid, terrorist infantry in the world.
“Good decision, Viktor,” said Abramov. “Now I should tell you both that I’ve ordered several company HQs to assign video technicians along the two-mile front. That means, Comrades, the pictures of the Americans being decimated as they attack us will be on CNN and Al Jazeera this evening, tomorrow morning’s newscasts at the latest.”
Cherkashin was a tad uncomfortable with Abramov’s use of the word “decimated.” The tank general was using it, Cherkashin knew, as most people did, to mean a casualty rate of nine out of ten, when in fact it had originally meant one casualty in ten. Still, this was a high rate for American commanders. Abramov’s TV idea was a good one, because the American public always started to panic as soon as they saw a single body bag coming off an aircraft on CNN. And when the CNN woman with the big chest, Marte Price, started yakking about more American casualties, the Americans would start going weak at the knees. She and other American media announcers were considered by ABC’s clientele such as El-Hage, Hamas, and Hezbollah as valuable, albeit unwitting, propagandists for the terrorist cause.
One of a pair of Hummers flown in less than ten minutes before from the second wave and ordered by Tibbet to assist Freeman in his attack through the tunnels’ exit, skidded to a stop as its gunner saw tanks moving and snaking quickly through the minefield’s safe road. The four tanks’ commanders were doing an Israeli, standing up, cupolas open to see better in the pouring rain, despite the T-90s’ infrared recon and laser-targeting system. The commanders, four of Abramov’s best from the Siberian Sixth, we
re cursing the snaking course of the road, meant to keep the tanks off a straight line to prevent any anti-armor units having time to “frame” them for successful missile attack. But now that the American line was reported as being still five hundred yards southeast of the square mile of mines, it was unlikely any of them would see any more Russian armor in the heavy rain.
Radio silence between the four T-90s was maintained. Instead, the tanks’ COs were communicating by the tried-and-true Russian method of using rapid yet distinct flag signals, such as those still used by such elite forces as the British Royal Navy when a ship was requested to go SID — Signals Dead — for reasons of launching a surprise attack against the enemy. Colonel Nureyev, Abramov’s second in command and tactical leader of the T-90 force, took the small but distinct yellow flag he used on such occasions and held it out snappily to his left. Soon they would be out of the minefield, the crackle and spit of small-arms fire so loud now that he could see the flashes of the soon-to-be outnumbered and outmechanized American force in this area.
Because of the midair collision of the Cobras during the first wave, many marines, because their transport helos had had to take sharp evasive action, ended up being too far north of the minefield and too close to the lake. Fighting their way westward from the lake, then south, they were exhausted and desperately short of ammunition and food. Worst of all, they were now too far away to lend support to Freeman’s team.
The three-man fire team of Kegg and the two other marines, one of them with the SAW machine gun, formed a C-shaped defensive arc facing away from the general area indicated on the Korean’s map as the exit zone. It was the C-arc’s job to protect the backs of Freeman, Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee as Choir used his small metallic “finger” to search for mines. As he moved the two-and-a-half-inch-long battery-powered sonar-activated probe, which extended like a bayonet from the end of his M-16, he listened attentively for the probe’s low-pitched return “warning,” the outgoing pitch so high that it was detectable by only a few individuals whose hearing was well above the 2,000-hertz level. The instrument was so expensive that only one had been issued per four-man fire team. It might have saved Eddie Mervyn from his horrific wound, but in the pressure of battle, not knowing how far away the Russians were, there had been no time to use it.
But now that Tibbet’s second wave was arriving, bolstering the first, Freeman seized the window of opportunity to press forward with the search for the exit hatch.
“No mines here, sir,” said Choir, planting one of his green safety flags and sweeping the finger from one side of the suspected exit zone to the other without getting a mine “tone” over his Walkman-type earphones. Preoccupied as he was with his task, indeed precisely because he was so preoccupied searching for mines, Choir thought of Prince and felt heartsick.
Two minutes later, one of the three marines manning the protective C-arc spotted a T-90’s aerial whipping back and forth and moving his way above head-high reeds two hundred yards away, its diesel engine a subdued but angry growl in the sodden vegetation. Then it disappeared.
“Shit!” said the marine. “Where’d he go?” He radioed back to the Hummer. “You see that tank?” he asked the corporal.
“Affirmative,” came the answer. “Got the fucker on thermal. There are three more a ways back, coming from the direction of the minefield.”
“Tone!” shouted Choir. “Ten o’clock.” He moved farther left. “Tone! They’ve mined this side of the snow hump right up to those four tree trunks that they’re using to hide the air shafts. But they’ve left clear ground on the other side, so that’s obviously where anyone coming out of the tunnels is going to head, if this is an exit.”
“Well,” Freeman ordered, “if we find an opening anywhere in this goddamn hump, make sure we flag it correctly.” He didn’t want to see another Eddie Mervyn incident.
“Let’s probe the snow mound on the mine-free side,” said Choir. “Quickly. Use your bayonets. If that map’s right, we should find a door or something.”
Freeman could hear more armor approaching in the distance. The tanks were moving more slowly than the first T-90 that the Hummer’s corporal had fixed in his thermal sight, but the general could see they were gaining ground nonetheless, and so he told the men to stop digging, ordering everyone back. He would use the Hummer to do the digging. “Corporal!” he radioed the Hummer. “Back up out of these reeds. Get two hundred yards from here. If we lose the radio, I’ll use visuals. One wave with my helmet, hit the mound with a TOW. Second Fritz, use another one. Got it?”
“Two hundred yards, one TOW on your wave, another on each subsequent wave. Got it, sir.”
With that, the Hummer made a tight U-turn, the still partially frozen reeds crunching underneath like cereal, a rush of the vehicle’s bluish exhaust rising, dissipating, and wafting over the C-arc marines and into the reeds around the tree trunks now twenty feet away from Freeman.
“Let’s all get back behind the Hummer!” shouted Freeman. “Soon as the second TOW hits it, we go in, no matter what. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Freeman’s marines said in unison, determination in their eyes.
Then everything went wrong.
Running back, Freeman saw the Hummer buck, glimpsed one of its TOW’s contrails, then heard the distinctive boom of a T-90’s main gun firing. The Hummer somersaulted, then disintegrated into gobs of fire; simultaneously a head-punching “whoomp!” told Freeman the T-90 had exploded, and he could see it belching flame and vomiting crimson fire into the dark green reeds.
He didn’t pause. “Everyone back to the mound and we’ll dig out that snow. Now! Aussie, go check the Hummer.” Aussie did, by which time the general, Choir, Sal, and Johnny Lee were using their trench tools to dig, scrape, and chuck away the snow. Sweating like gandy dancers on a railroad in high summer, perspiration running down each man’s face, they dug like men possessed.
Aussie came running back from the Hummer. “All dead!” he reported tersely. “Nothing usable.” He began digging. They all heard the ring of metal against an entrenching tool and fell to the ground, except Choir.
“Not a mine!” he assured them. “Just metal on metal.” It was a door handle; another handle became visible a second later.
“No shovels,” Freeman ordered. “Hands only.” He had no idea how close the exit was to the tunnels, only that the map had shown a narrow tubular exit burrowed out of the rock approximately four feet wide and less than a hundred feet long on a thirty-degree gradient which, as he noted to Aussie, was an extraordinarily sharp incline. If they were approaching the tunnel entrance, Freeman didn’t want to give his team’s presence away by making any unnecessary noise. Drawing on all his expertise in things military and nonmilitary, Freeman devised a war plan on the spot. “Aussie, Sal, Johnny, come with me. Choir, I want you to handle the grenades.”
“Right,” responded Choir, already donning his IR goggles and gas mask, his tone confident. After years of working as part of Freeman’s team, and of always thinking one step ahead, he was ready for action.
“Good,” said Freeman who, with Aussie, Sal, and Johnny Lee, began donning his IR goggles and gas mask.
“Choir,” Freeman instructed, “start the proceedings!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ninety feet below in a guard station at the foot of the long exit stairway, a guard unit of seven men and three women responsible for the security of the exit end of ABC’s tunnel complex were bored silly. Completely cut off from the action above them and long used to the numbing sameness of production line noises in the three tunnels, there was nothing new to do or discuss, other than the American attack, about which they had been given no news whatsoever. The only thing that mitigated the sheer bone-crushing monotony of guard duty in the three connected tunnels was the substantial tunnelnaya premiya— tunnel bonus. But even the bonus could not keep the guard detail on their feet during the eight-hour shift. And, despite the strict rules against it, a game of Texas Hold ’Em Poker
would usually be in progress, as it was now, with the latest production line inspector wandering over now and then between checking the counterfeit American, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers’ serial numbers on the completed Igla and Vanguard MANPADs and the new hypersonic weapons and ammunition being made as a result of ABC’s victory at DARPA ALPHA.
“Did you hear that scraping noise?” one of the card-playing four asked.
“Don’t worry, Andreyovich,” said the number checker, Vladimir. “The exit door must be under a ton of snow. If it is anything, it’s probably one of those stupid deer rooting around for grass. Anyway, in this weather all kinds of crap’s blowing around the lake and the marshes. Plus, last reports from H-block say we can just keep working, no problem. The Americans are getting the shit kicked out of them.”
Andreyovich nodded. “Maybe, but someone had better check. Let’s not risk the bonus. Vladimir, you come up with me.” Andreyovich looked at his cards, the worst hand he’d had in months. “I’m out,” he said, grabbing his AK-47. “Need to stretch my legs anyway.”
“Good man!” said the numbers inspector, a big, bald, jovial man from one of the hamlets near the railhead that were now all but ghost towns, ABC having combed them for maintenance support workers.
Both guards heard several hollow-sounding bumps as Choir tossed two tear gas canisters and yellow SOS smoke grenades onto the grates of the two air-intake shafts. The yellow smoke laced with tear gas descended quickly, spreading throughout the three parallel tunnels, their connecting passages, and the entrance and exit vestibules at either end of the tunnels. The moment the terrorist guards and weapons assemblers at the exit end of the three tunnels saw the thickening malevolent-looking yellow gas pouring down the ninety-foot-long, cement-lined exit shaft, the alarm horn sounded, its deep, strangled “Arggh! Arggh!” drowning out the usual cacophony of the assembly line. The horn’s unrelenting blasts, accompanied by the scream of “Gaz!” filling the subterranean world, turned panic to frenzy, sending the disorganized horde of three hundred terrorist workers rushing away from the exit toward the massive security doors at the tunnels’ entrance, roars of rage erupting from the frantic mob when they found the inner security door locked. The terror of 243 men and 57 women clamoring, screaming for the door to be opened, fed on itself. The duty officer, who only hours before had thought himself incapable of pushing the button that would explode the RDX unless he was blackmailed, now discovered that his fear of the mob made it easier to contemplate putting his fellow terrorists out of their misery.
