Far below him he spotted a flash of light through the goggles, light which he took to be the last of the Tomcat’s bombs, and used it as an aiming point. Several seconds later he felt the shock wave of the explosion hitting him. A fierce crackling invaded the echo chamber of his helmet as radio silence was broken by the C-141, General Freeman shouting, “Mission aborted… mission aborted… field…” The rest was a surge of static. What the hell? Brentwood knew that by now most of the SAS stick would be out of the plane, possibly even one or two of the Delta force. He looked at the altimeter, couldn’t make it out for a second, then saw he was less than a minute away from two and a half thousand feet. Then he glimpsed a bluish white dot, two of them, flitting by a thousand feet below him like tiny fireflies, and guessed, correctly, that it was one of the twin-engined Tomcats, probably on afterburner. It was split-second timing by the navy but cutting it a bit fine all the same.
Then the unfinished part of the message he’d received from the C-141 made sense, hitting him with the force of a high explosive shock wave as he saw orange pinpoints of light, like flashlights switching quickly on and off beneath the dim blanket of snow, racing up at him from the northern part of the island. The “field” in the radio transmit must be “minefield,” set off by the Tomcat’s bombs. The C-141 had broken radio silence to tell Brentwood and the other SAS already speeding down toward the island that Ratmanov had been seeded with mines. The whole island was a minefield. More splotches of light, white swellings on the infrared’s green background, confirmed it. Worse — by now the snow would have covered any footprints, giving no clue to the pattern of mines laid — if there was any — nor indicating the positions of the rat holes. The Siberians had had at least an hour to—
There was another surge of static in his helmet from the C-141. But now all he could pick up was “… abort… abort…” and all he could see was the snow field becoming wider and wider as he neared touchdown. Had the mines been scattered willy-nilly, or were they, in SPETS fashion, laid so as to funnel attackers into deadly triangulated COF—”cones of fire”? But no matter how the mines had been laid, David knew the Allied paratroopers — mostly, if not all, SAS — would find themselves unable to move, forced to fight and the where they landed.
For a split second David thought of increasing the leftward drift and heading out over the cliffs for the relative safety of the ice floe. He’d save himself, but he’d be no use to anyone else. The altimeter showed he was at three thousand feet, two thousand nine hundred… In three and a half seconds he’d be at twenty-five hundred. Pull the cord or drift eastward, away from the island?
He pulled the rip cord, heard the snap, felt the sudden deceleration, and tugged hard on the right toggle, feeling that side of the chute curl and brake as he went into a tight, controlled spiral, the sky around him alive now with lazy arcs of red and white tracer, the air exploding with the rattle and bang of AA fire, the screams as men died in the harness and the pop of flares adding to the cacophony of sound. Suddenly all was bright. A moment of civil twilight; then the flare dropped away from him. He could hear bursts of machine-gun fire like paper tearing. Quickly he paid out the fifteen-foot-long tether line attached to his equipment bundle, evening the pull on both toggles, his heart threatening to burst out of his chest. Below he could see long, black shadows piercing a white, flare-lit circle of snow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The fax traffic, preferred by many MVD offices over the regular military channels, was informing Novosibirsk HQ that at this very moment, at 10:03 a.m. Thursday morning — that is, 11:03 a.m. Wednesday on little Diomede, only two and a half miles across the date/boundary line between the U.S. and USSR — with a half hour to go before the Bering Strait passed out of utter darkness into civil twilight, an Allied airborne attack was underway against Ratmanov Island.
Another fax, classified as tayna— “secret”— but momentarily considered less important to Novosibirsk HQ than the American general’s attack on Ratmanov, came through with the information that the submarine that had attacked the two supertankers off America’s northwest coast had reported that one of the torpedoes it had fired had not exploded, a common-enough complaint from the Far Eastern TVD HQ at Khabarovsk. Normally this would merely have been entered as a nerazorvavshiysya snaryad— “dud”— but it was seen by an alert intelligence officer at Novosibirsk who realized that it was opening up an old sore for Khabarovsk TVD HQ — the suspected sabotage of munitions by Jews living in one of the YAOs, or Jewish autonomous regions — in this case a lamb chop-shaped Jewish enclave, 120 miles at its widest, around Birobidzhan. A hundred and fifteen miles west of Khabarovsk, the Jewish region was near the Manchurian border.
In Khabarovsk, KGB chief Colonel Nefski had just returned from the Bear Restaurant having downed an enormous plate of pig’s feet, fresh bread, and wine served by an elderly waiter whose atrocious French lent an air of sophistication whenever Nefski and other senior officers patronized the restaurant. But if Nefski could be fooled by pretensions of French cuisine, there wasn’t much anyone could tell him about the best way to deal with suspected saboteurs. Gorbachev, of course, had vsyo is-portil—”ballsed everything up”—so that even after he had gone and things started to return to something like normal around Khabarovsk there were still idiosyncratic pockets of bureaucracy so that, for example, before he could have “absolute” authority to deal with the Jews it was necessary to get Novosibirsk’s approval. No one would have questioned him had he gone ahead with his own plan, but Nefski knew how pieces of paper not obtained could be used later against one by unscrupulous political opponents. Gorbachev and that other fool, Yeltsin — God rot them — had actually encouraged the Jews for a time to believe they had the same rights as any other Soviet citizen.
As Nefski waited impatiently by the window of his third-floor office for confirmation that his fax had gotten through to Novosibirsk, he took another Sobraine from his cigarette tin and lit it, pouring the acrid, bluish-gray smoke against the frosted windows through which he could faintly see the red-and-yellow tram cars making their way in the blizzard along Khabarovsk’s wide avenues. One’s position, he ruminated to his subaltern, was all a matter of distance from the capital. First, Moscow. Now, Novosibirsk. Like the Americans who lived in Alaska and the American Northwest who were never understood by Washington’s bureaucrats, Nefski had ample evidence that Novosibirsk never understood the tyranny of distance, never fully appreciated the enormous implications of the fact that the lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed barely fifty miles from the Chinese border out here.
Should the Americans, now that they held Korea, decide to cross the Yalu River that separated China’s Manchurian provinces from Korea then wheel westward onto the Great Northern Plain of China, the Jews would seize their chance and cut the rail line, thus effectively cutting off Khabarovsk and Vladivostok farther south on the coast. Disaster would follow. Khabarovsk and Vladivostok were the linchpins of the entire Siberian offensive against the Americans on the eastern flank.