“Yes, sir.”
As the young captain contacted Elmendorf he tried to figure out what the general was up to. You had to start figuring things out with Freeman; otherwise the hardass would come down on you like a ton of bricks. As he heard Freeman outlining his latest brain wave to Elmendorf, the captain couldn’t help thinking there were a lot of guys who’d like to see Hardass on the end of the first chute.
After the call Freeman seemed more relaxed, even if preoccupied. His calm blue eyes now fixed on the dough model like a chess player, noting again how the island sloped steeply westward from the seventeen-hundred-foot-high eastern cliffs. You could go around the island — come in the back door — but the island was so small (five miles long and three miles at its widest) that it didn’t matter where you landed a combined SAS/Delta team of a hundred and forty men, providing they didn’t land too close to the cliff’s edge. As the general stared at the cliffs of his makeshift model, he was no longer aboard the Boeing but back at Monte Casino, where the Nazi troops, reinforced by SS commandos, held off the attacking Allies for weeks. Weeks were something Freeman knew he couldn’t afford. Every day lost was another day that the Siberians could use to reinforce their far eastern flank. It had to be a complete surprise after the air force had roughed up the Rat’s nest with their cruise missiles.
Running his hand through a shock of graying hair, Freeman kept his gaze on the model, trying to think what the Siberian commander would do if the cruise missile attack didn’t do the trick and if the Siberian anticipated an airborne invasion. Hopefully the missiles would knock out the island’s main defenses from the sheer shock of the explosions. A piece of crust — part of the cliff’s edge — was swelling as the cabin pressure altered during the Boeing’s descent, then fell off.
“We should be so lucky, eh, General?” said the captain, handing him a coffee. “They say the SPETS are their upper crust, General.”
“Yes,” answered Freeman. He sounded morose. Suddenly feeling all eyes on him, as if every console operator on the Boeing had suddenly become unnerved by his tone, Freeman adopted an airy, friendly mood. “You know what the upper crust is, gentlemen?” he asked, immediately answering his own question. “Lot of crumbs stuck together with dough!”
A few laughs, some groans.
“You’re right. It’s awful. All right then — how about this? Guy comes home and his wife points to the light bulb and says, ‘That bulb’s been flickering on and off all day. It’s not the bulb — it must be the wiring or something. Will you fix it?’
“ ‘Do I look like an electrician?’ says the guy and flops down in front of the TV. ‘Get an electrician.’
“Next day he comes home and she tells him the tap in the basement is dripping — driving her nuts. Will he fix it? ‘Hey— do I look like a plumber?’ he says and flops back down in front of the TV. Next night he comes home, the light’s working fine— and no more dripping tap.
“ ‘You did it yourself!’ he says.
“ ‘No,’ she answers. ‘That young guy down the lane out of work. He fixed them.’
“ ‘What’d he charge?’
‘“I asked him, and he said he didn’t want any money. Either I could go to bed with him or bake him a cake.’
“ ‘Geez!’ says the husband. ‘Hope you baked him a cake!’ and she says, ‘Do I look like Betty Crocker?’ “
Laughter was mixed with the whine of the undercarriage going down. Buckling up, Freeman turned to his interim aide. “You know what causes the largest percentage of pre-invasion casualties, son?”
“Airborne, sir?”
“If you like.”
“Practice jumps, sir. Chutes that don’t open,” replied the captain. “Friendly fire.”
“Vehicle accidents,” said Freeman. “Most of our young Turks are under twenty-four, Captain. Drive like maniacs. Any man convicted on a speed or reckless-driving offense answers to me — personally — and his CO pays the fine: five hundred dollars. Got it?”
“Five hundred dollars, General?”
“First offense. A grand for the second.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How old are you, son?”
“Twenty-one, sir.”
Freeman nodded.
“Now when we reach Cape Prince of Wales, Dick Norton, my aide from Europe, will take over your job in my HQ. I want you to understand there’s nothing personal in this. It’s just that we’ve got very little time to spring this thing, and Dick and I’ve worked before. Planned the SAS Moscow raid. Understand?”
“Yes, sir. No problem.”
The young captain was enormously relieved. Rumor was that when you worked for Freeman it was a steam bath: twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on call every second, and God help you if you screwed up. Only man that worked harder than Freeman’s aide, they said, was Freeman himself.
“But—” continued Freeman, “to stress that I’ve full confidence in you, son, you’re invited along for the jump.” In a rush — like the feeling when he’d slithered down the bannister when he was a boy — cold-bowel fear struck the captain. Freeman was going to take the airborne in himself. Given his reputation in the Pyongyang raid and the fact that the general had led the Allies’ armored breakout from the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was.
“Dick Norton,” said Freeman happily, “is gonna have a pup! Goddamn, he hates flying. Course,” said Freeman confidently, “I’ll need him to stay behind to coordinate the MEU follow-up. He’ll come in after in the choppers. But I’ll kid him a bit. You watch his face, Captain. Go white as flour — sort of like yours.” He slapped the captain heartily.”Just kidding, son. No one’s going in who hasn’t had HALO training. You come in with the choppers, too.” The captain’s legs felt weak.
As the wheels hit then grabbed the tarmac, Freeman saw the drops of condensation on his window, wind-driven into long tears. “Just hope to Christ that that Siberian son of a bitch isn’t anticipating an airborne assault. Course it won’t be necessary if that big bird from Elmendorf does its job.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Alaska, high above the Yankee River’s winding ribbon of gray ice that cut through the predawn darkness of the Seward Peninsula’s mountains, the four crewmen aboard the Rockwell B-1B, its four thirty-thousand-pound GE-F 102 turbofans on afterburner, could see the two white dots of the Diomedes jutting up westward through the white ice pack as the bomber rose to “stand off” position.
In a direct line eighty miles from Big Diomede, the B-1’s wings were now fully extended for greater stability as it fired off ten million dollars in the form of eight SRAM AGM-69Bs— short range attack missiles — each with a one hundred mile range. They streaked in eight white contrails from the bomber’s “revolver chamber” rotary launcher. The B-1’s EWO ignored the missiles the moment the launch was over, alert now only to the Eaton defensive avionics system; another crewman kept a close eye on the Singer-Kearfott inertial navigation system. The sound of the earsplitting explosions as the three-thousand-pound warheads hit Big Diomede’s eastern cliffs was heard almost instantaneously in Inalik village on Little Diomede, followed seconds later by the shock wave. The latter started loose ice and rock falling; it crashed a quarter mile north of the village in a dirty spill of unearthed boulders and rubble that spilled onto the ice-fringed shore. The multiple cracks on the thick ice floes sounded to the villagers like the splitting noise of stiff sealskins drying in the bitterly cold wind.